The article seems to rest on the idea that if Google wasn't funding these guys, there wouldn't be any academic opinion in their favor. But no less of an authority on anti-trust than Robert Bork was also against the FTC action[1]. Article also doesn't seem bothered by the fact that the pro-FTC-action group, fairsearch.org, is a puppet group of Microsoft. If the people spurring FTC investigations are Google's corporate enemies, it only seems fair for Google to defend themselves with a bit of academic funding.
Everyone knows Microsoft does not always play nice. Also funding a group is nowhere the same as manipulating academia slyly (fixing academic conference speakers). Yikes. Did not expect this from Google.
> Google played an unusually active role in the George Mason conferences. The Washington Post has previously published emails showing Google public policy representatives giving LEC officials detailed information on what regulatory, law enforcement and Congressional staff to invite to the conference.
> Nowhere do sponsors actively set the agenda for an academic conference.
Agenda is one thing but that's not what either article is claiming?
It's extremely common (the rule, not the exception) for sponsors to suggest and directly invite people to conferences (and at least in those published emails there doesn't appear to be any suggestions for speakers, just attendees).
That's an email from "James Cooper, a former FTC staffer and director of research and policy at the LEC", not someone from Google?
Asking someone who works at a sponsor of a conference for suggestions of who to put on a panel at that conference isn't really in the realm of that sponsor "setting the agenda"
That reads to me more like trying to actually diversify the attendance, rather than trying to hide the overrepresentation of Google. Google faces the same problem at other conferences, for what it's worth. There were some Lisa / USENIX type things focused on "site reliability engineering" where Google was noticeably overrepresented.
> Everyone knows Microsoft does not always play nice.
Far from true. As a 40-something, I share the same viewpoint on Microsoft, but I'm talked with many 20-somethings who seemed surprised at my outright rejection of using anything from Microsoft.
For most of their lives, Microsoft has been operating under the close supervision of the US Justice Dept (in the person of US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly), and she said that the company had been "overwhelmingly cooperative". It's also had the European Commission on its back, trying to extract any fines it could possibly get. So, it's been obliged to play nicely enough to stay within the law, and it's had to pay heavily for any lapses.
For what it's worth (probably not much), Microsoft has also been on the list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies for the past five years running.
So, how bothered are you personally about any bad things companies may have done 15-20 years before you were born? How bothered do you expect them to be?
I think it would be more correct to say that he was against the kind of antitrust action they practice in Europe, which protects the competitors, and in favor of the kind we practice in America, which is focused on protecting the consumer, which makes sense because Bork set the agenda for modern antitrust enforcement in America. As your article states, Bork is the most-cited author on the topic. He defined antitrust.
https://www.criterioneconomics.com/docs/bork-sidak-google-se...