> 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.
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).