Several Seattle employees of both Google and Amazon were busted after using their corporate accounts to send emails to local brothels and pimps looking to purchase services from sex workers trafficked from Asia, according to emails obtained by Newsweek.
"[E]mails obtained by Newsweek reveal another sordid corner of the tech sector’s treatment of women: a horny nest of prostitution “hobbyists” at tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and other firms in Seattle’s high tech alley."
Many of the emails were swept up in a 2015 sting operation which targeted online chat rooms and message boards in which customers rate sex workers - resulting in the arrest of 18 of these "prostitution hobbyists," including several high level Amazon and Microsoft directors - two of which are currently scheduled for trial in March.
Seattle brothels had been catering to Microsoft employees through several "backpage.com" ads located nearby the company"s Redmond, WA headquarters, in what is becoming a booming business.
A study commissioned by the Department of Justice found that Seattle has the fastest-growing sex industry in the United States, more than doubling in size between 2005 and 2012. That boom correlates neatly with the boom of the tech sector there. It also correlates to the surge in high-paying jobs, since this “hobby” (the word johns use online to describe buying sex) can be expensive: some of these men spent $30,000 to $50,000 a year, according to authorities.
The tech sector has not only employed a significant number of men who pay for sex with trafficked women, it has also enabled traffickers to more easily reach customers and to hide their business from cops by taking it off the streets and into computers and ultimately, hotel rooms, motels or apartments. In one 24-hour-period in Seattle, an estimated 6,487 people solicited sex on just one of the more than 100 websites that connect buyers with sellers, according to a 2014 study.
Of note, Backpage.com shut down its adult sections in January, citing government pressure following a 2016 Senate report on commercial sex services fingered the website as a hotbed for criminal activity, and stating that "Backpage officials have publicly acknowledged that criminals use the website for sex trafficking, including trafficking of minors."
Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer (Texas AG)
In October, 2016, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer was arrested in Houston and the company"s Dallas headquarters searched. NPR reported at the time that Ferrer, 55, was charged with pimping a minor, pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping. Two controlling shareholders of Backpage — Michael Lacey and James Larkin — also are charged with conspiracy to commit pimping."
The prostitutes trafficked from Asia typically don"t speak much English, relying on translation apps to offer services such as "girlfriend" experiences and "Nuru" (nude massage). Many of the women are working their way out of debt bondage, and feared for their lives or those of their families - according to one pimp interviewed during the 2015 sting.
A spokesman for Microsoft said of the emails "Microsoft has a long history of cooperating with law enforcement and other agencies on combating sex trafficking and related topics, and we have employees who volunteer their time and money specifically to combat this issue as well. The personal conduct of a tiny fraction of our 125,000 employees does not in any way represent our culture. No organization is immune to the unfortunate situation when employees act unethically or illegally. When that happens, we look into the conduct and take appropriate action. Microsoft makes it clear to our employees they have a responsibility to act with integrity and conduct themselves in a legal and ethical manner at all times. If they don’t, they risk losing their jobs."
Amazon told Newsweek it"s investigating the matter, and that "It is against Amazon"s policy for any employee or Contingent Worker to engage in any sex buying activities of any kind in Amazon"s workplace or in any work-related setting outside of the workplace, such as during business trips, business meetings or business-related social events." When Amazon suspects that an employee has used company funds or resources to engage in criminal conduct, the company will immediately investigate and take appropriate action up to and including termination. The company may also refer the matter to law enforcement."
A team of researchers at Stanford University have trained artificial intelligence algorithms to observe and study millions of images on Google Street View to determine how people vote by the make of their car. The algorithms were trained to recognize the make, model, and year of every car produced since 1990, in more than 50 million Google Street View images across 200 American cities.
The data on car types and location were then compared against the most comprehensive demographic database in use today, the American Community Survey, and against presidential election voting data to estimate demographic factors such as race, education, income and voter preferences, the Stanford News reported.
Fei-Fei Li, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, led the team of researchers who published the study on Tuesday in the official journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and found a “simple linear relationship” between cars, demographics and political persuasion.
Li is an expert in computer vision and deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence in which she teaches algorithms to “recognize three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional images”. The algorithms were trained, but more importantly, they became self-aware combing through millions of images on Google Street View in identifying the political preference of a citizen through the car they owned.
“Using easily obtainable visual data, we can learn so much about our communities, on par with some information that takes billions of dollars to obtain via census surveys. More importantly, this research opens up more possibilities of virtually continuous study of our society using sometimes cheaply available visual data,” Li said.
According to the study: "If the number of sedans in a neighborhood is greater than the number of pickups, there is an 88 percent chance that the precinct will vote Democratic. Transpose those numbers to have more pickups than sedans and there is an 82 percent chance a precinct will vote Republican.
The algorithms worked day and night for two weeks and were able to probe through 50 million images creating 2,657 categories by make, model, and year. Standford News said that “a human working at a relatively high rate of six images a minute would need 15 years to complete the same task”.
Researchers believe their algorithm could be an inexpensive real time solution to the more costly demographic surveys. For example, the American Community Survey costs the U.S. more than $250 million per year a lag time between data collection and publication that could span 2-years. Li’s algorithm is a hopeful to replace the current surveys.
Not so fast, however said Timnit Gebru, first author of the paper and formerly a member of Li’s lab, who does not “see something like this replacing the American Community Survey, but as a supplement to keep the data up to date.” Gebru has high hopes for the technology of extracting critical information in the world around us on inexpensive platforms such as Google Street View.
“If you walk around a neighborhood looking at cars, the density of traffic sometimes tells you things as valuable as the types of cars you see on the streets. We can use all this information in our algorithms,” Gebru said. Li agreed, counterting that “It can help us understand how our society works, the things people need and how we can improve lives,” Li said. “There is great potential to use computer vision technology in a constructive and benevolent way.”
And while AI algos at an elite academic institution are mapping out the political preferences of each American by location, with what one hopes are ultimately benign intentions, one wonders what would happen if the data fell into the wrong hands, or if - gasp - the "election manipulating" Russians were to do a similar analysis using entirely publicly available data? Would America"s next president be an organgutan?
OK, it’s from Russia Today so you should of course not trust it but somehow this video and text and the man in it seems quite factual, not fake and obviously not omitted.
It documents that Eric Emerson Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Alphabet – an American multinational conglomerate that owns a lot and among them Google – is working on “de-ranking” alleged propaganda outlets such as Russia Today, RT – the world’s third largest television network – and Sputnik.
Who is Eric Schmidt?
On the Wikipedia link you can read more about Mr. Schmidt, one of the richest person on earth, an advocate of net neutrality, a corporate manager and owner of a lot, a collector of modern art, etc. And you can read about his heavy involvement with Hillary Clinton’s recent campaign and the Obama administration and about Schmidt’s involvement with Pentagon, too.
Eric Emerson Schmidt’s name is associated with the world’s largest and most systematic data collecting search engine, Google, that millions upon millions use. School children, teachers, parents, media people, politicians and you and I all daily “google” what we need to know.
While we do that, Google tracks everything about us and if you are searching for a thing to buy, say a camera, be sure that camera ads will shortly after turn up on your screen. And they know everything we are interested in through our “googling” including political interests and hobbies.
Playing God
This very powerful corporate leader with a open political orientation has decided - as will be seen 58 seconds into the video – that the Internet and his hugely dominating search engine a) shall cave in to political pressure, b) de-rank at least these two Russian media organizations because c) he knows they are “propaganda outlets” (it isn’t discussed at all or compared with US or other countries’ media) and d) in the name of political correctness it is OK to limit the freedom of opinion-formation.
In fact, he says in a few words that he – well, not he himself but a computer program and mechanism called an algorithm – shall decide what you are I shall be able to find. Google as Good, Google as God.
Conspicuously, his de-ranking – read censorship – policy shall not hit media (as far as we can understand from this clip at least and not from this backgrounder either) that have, for instance, been using fake news and planted stories, omitted facts and perspectives and sources and told us propaganda and worse about, say, US wars around the world.
It’s Russia’s media. And naturally you ask: Whose next? And where does that end? (“Wherever they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings.” – Heinrich Heine).
Obvious human rights violation
This type of political paternalism is not only totally unethical and foolish, it’s a violation of human rights. It cannot be defended with the argument that other countries and media outlets also use propaganda. The Western world – the U.S. in particular – calls itself ‘the free world” and gladly, without the slightest doubts, fights and kills to spread that freedom around the world and has done so for decades.
We humans have right to information without interference – at least if international law counts. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
You abuse power, Mr. Schmidt
Mr Schmidt, you are blatantly and clearly interfering in the rights of millions, if not billions, to know. To seek information. To shape their opinions.
With your few words you abuse your almost unlimited digital, political, economic and ‘defence’ power – much much worse than if you had sexually abused just one woman for which older men today are fired or choose to resign.
This has to be stated irrespective of whether we like or dislike Russia and its media. That is not the issue here. This has to be fought against because it is slippery slope, Mr Schmidt.
You ought to stand up and use your powers with principles and vision: To protect the Internet against every and each reduction of freedom. Freedom for all, also the fake news-makers however we define them. Yes, there is another solution for that problem and it is not your paternalism.
It just cannot be for you to decide what is good for others and collect data about us all which is only good for you.
Has the West really become so insecure about itself?
Censorship – de-ranking – and information warfare is not the solution to anything. A strong society or culture that believes in its own moral value and vitality does not censor. Dictatorships – “regimes” – do.
Mr. Schmidt has much more power than many state leaders but he is not up to it and how would he be able to re-rank themes and media again in the future.
Has the West, the US and Western culture become so weak, so trembling at the sight of the global future and so morally deranged that it cannot live with – does not believe it can compete factually and intelligently with – other views? With fake? With propaganda by others? If so, that is where the Soviet Union was in the early 1980s. And if so, watch the writing of the Western walls!
Education and trust
There are much better solutions – if you think. Mr. Schmidt may also google them…
It’s education – education of young and old to learn to identify what is trustworthy and what is not. Learning to learn on the Internet. It is dialogue and it is dignity – instead of succumbing to the lowest of levels that he accuses others of being at.
And there is more solutions.
Making democracy, freedom and human rights stronger – by believing in human beings, their intelligence and solidarity. When Google de-ranks, it de-humanises. It offends the intelligence of the world’s users of the Google search engine.
It sinks to the low level where fakers and liars are – devoid of morals but passionate about selling a particular message even if totally unfounded.
What are you so afraid of, Mr. Schmidt?
If I were Eric Schmidt, I think I would be afraid of being perceived as a “useful idiot” or an an evil operator on behalf of US militarism – since he is targeting Russia in a the new Cold War atmosphere.
After all is/was a member also of various US government security and Pentagon related boards. And after all, he spoke at the Halifax Security Forum filled with military defence people and hardliners who see only Russia, North Korea and Iran as problems, never the US itself. One of the panels deals with the “Post-Putin Prep”!
Regime change in Russia too in the future and with truthful news from Google?
Mr. Schmidt and his corporate fellows should also be afraid that millions will become more sympathetic to Russia Today, Sputnik and even Russia itself precisely because of his words.
There are no wars on the ground without information war. If Schmidt’s Google fights political wars with de-ranking, many of us will be de-parting to more peaceful, rights-respecting and ethical search engines than his. So until further:
Slowly but surely, Americans have been conditioned to give up any expectations of privacy in the name of public safety and/or for simple technological conveniences. However, there remains, even today, a tiny sliver of the population that would prefer to not have their every movement tracked no matter how antiquated that makes them look. Be that as it may, per a recent discovery from Quartz, those old-school folks better hope they haven"t been using an Android device for the past 11 months.
Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.
Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice.
Of course, the company that has been collecting your location data for nearly a year now without your knowledge, would like for you to know that you shouldn"t worry too much about your privacy because they can assure you the data was never "used or stored" and was only collected to help "improve the speed and performance of message delivery"....
The cell tower addresses have been included in information sent to the system Google uses to manage push notifications and messages on Android phones for the past 11 months, according to a Google spokesperson. They were never used or stored, the spokesperson said, and the company is now taking steps to end the practice after being contacted by Quartz. By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google, at least as part of this particular service, which consumers cannot disable.
“In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery,” the Google spokesperson said in an email. “However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID.”
...you know, because wireless carriers haven"t quite figured out yet how to efficiently route data streams through network nodes just yet...
It is not clear how cell-tower addresses, transmitted as a data string that identifies a specific cell tower, could have been used to improve message delivery. But the privacy implications of the covert location-sharing practice are plain. While information about a single cell tower can only offer an approximation of where a mobile device actually is, multiple towers can be used to triangulate its location to within about a quarter-mile radius, or to a more exact pinpoint in urban areas, where cell towers are closer together.
The practice is troubling for people who’d prefer they weren’t tracked, especially for those such as law-enforcement officials or victims of domestic abuse who turn off location services thinking they’re fully concealing their whereabouts. Although the data sent to Google is encrypted, it could potentially be sent to a third party if the phone had been compromised with spyware or other methods of hacking. Each phone has a unique ID number, with which the location data can be associated.
“It has pretty concerning implications,” said Bill Budington, a software engineer who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for digital privacy. “You can kind of envision any number of circumstances where that could be extremely sensitive information that puts a person at risk.”
"It is really a mystery as to why this is not optional,” said Matthew Hickey, a security expert and researcher at Hacker House, a security firm based in London. “It seems quite intrusive for Google to be collecting such information that is only relevant to carrier networks when there are no SIM card or enabled services.”
Of course, if their excuse for this gross invasion of privacy is even remotely true, then we look forward Google"s follow-up report to Android users detailing precisely how much faster their text messages are now than before...we won"t hold our breath.
In Silicon Valley"s ongoing crusade to make sure that you only consume mainstream media propaganda, you know because $100,000 worth of Facebook ads crushed Hillary"s campaign and changed the course of human history forever, YouTube has joined the likes of Facebook and Twitter in saying that it will promote more "authoritative sources in search results" going forward. All of which, once again, begs the question of who gets to determine who is an "authoritative source?"
As the Wall Street Journal points out today, YouTube searches for "Las Vegas Shooting" earlier this week included a video from "End Times News Report" with the title "Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG Attack - Shooter on 4th Floor." The video, created by Jake Morphonios who posts YouTube videos in his spare time, quickly went viral and amassed over 1.1 million views in just 27 hours...but all that changed when YouTube decided to censor Morphonios" content and replace it with mainstream media videos...you know for your protection.
For example, the fifth result when searching “Las Vegas shooting” on YouTube late Tuesday yielded a video titled “Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG attack—Shooter on 4th Floor.” The video said there were multiple shooters in Sunday’s mass shooting, a claim dismissed by law enforcement. Posted by a channel called the End Times News Report, it amassed more than 1.1 million views in about 27 hours.
The high search ranking of the End Times News Report video claiming there was a second shooter in Las Vegas helped it gain 371,000 views over four hours late Tuesday. On Wednesday, YouTube removed the video.
Jake Morphonios, who runs the End Times News Report along with a damaged-inventory-liquidation business in Kernersville, N.C., said the video eventually reached 2.5 million views. “It was a hot topic, of course, and was going to get some views anyway, but it really did get caught in [YouTube’s] algorithm and went viral from there,” he said. “Clearly it got into featured videos or something.” The 43-year-old said he has posted about 800 videos and typically gets about 5,000 views each.
He said he aims to offer viewers information on news events that mainstream news sources won’t. “It’s my opinion, it’s my analysis, and everyone’s got an opinion, and I can understand that maybe they don’t want me to be considered the equivalent of The Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or something like that,” he said. “But still, I’m not presenting myself as mainstream media. I’m just a guy with a computer offering an opinion. And to be punished for that is, well, it’s draconian.”
Not surprisingly, YouTube said the the "tweaks" made to their search engines were designed to promote more "authoritative sources," especially when searches are related to "major news events."
In response to criticism on social media of some search results this week, a person familiar with YouTube said the company is accelerating the rollout of planned changes to its search engine. On Wednesday night, the video service began promoting more authoritative sources in search results, especially pertaining to major news events, the person said. YouTube doesn’t disclose how it determines which sources areauthoritative.
But while YouTube refused to offer any insights into how they plan to decipher "authoritative sources" from "non-authoritative sources", running the same search for "Las Vegas shooting" today, after YouTube"s "tweaks", provides some clues on their methodology...
Conclusion, YouTube"s "tweaks" have turned it into nothing more than a mainstream media echo chamber.
Google has taken the unprecedented step of burying material, mostly from websites on the political right, that it has deemed to be inappropriate. The problem, however, is that the world"s largest search engine is a left-leaning company with an ax to grind.
Let"s face it, deep down in our heart of hearts we knew the honeymoon wouldn"t last forever. Our willingness to place eternal faith in an earth-straddling company that oversees the largest collection of information ever assembled was doomed to end in a bitter divorce from the start. After all, each corporation, just like humans, has their own political proclivities, and Google is certainly no exception. But we aren"t talking about your average car company here.
The first sign Google would eventually become more of a political liability than a public utility was revealed in 2005 when CEO Eric Schmidt (who is now executive chairman of Alphabet, Inc, Google"s parent company) sat down with interviewer Charlie Rose, who asked Schmidt to explain"where the future of search is going."
Schmidt"s response should have triggered alarm bells across the free world.
"Well, when you use Google, do you get more than one answer," Schmidt asked rhetorically, before answering deceptively.
"Of course you do. Well, that"s a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once... and we should never be wrong."
Really?
Think about that for a moment. Schmidt believes, counter-intuitively, that getting multiple possible choices for any one Google query is not the desirable prospect it should be (aren"t consumers always in search of more variety?), but rather a "bug" that should be duly squashed underfoot. Silly mortal, you should not expect more than one answer for every question because the almighty Google, our modern-day Oz, "should never be wrong!" This is the epitome of corporate hubris. And it doesn"t require much imagination to see that such a master plan will only lead to a colossal whitewashing of the historic record.
For example, if a Google user performs a search request for - oh, I don"t know - "what caused the Iraq War 2003," he or she would be given, according to Schmidt"s algorithmic wet dream, exactly one canned answer. Any guesses on what that answer would be? I think it"s safe to say the only acceptable answer would be the state-sanctioned conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction, an oft-repeated claim we now know to be patently false. The list of other such complicated events that also demand more than one answer - from the Kennedy assassination to the Gulf of Tonkin incident - could be continued for many pages.
Schmidt"s grandiose vision, where there is just "one answer to every question," sounds like a chapter borrowed from Orwell"s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, where omnipresent Big Brother had an ironclad grip on history, news, information, everything. In such a intensely controlled, nightmarish world, individuals - as well as entire historical events - can be "disappeared" down the memory hole without a trace. Though we"ve not quite reached that bad land yet, we"re plodding along in that direction.
That much became disturbingly clear ever since Donald Trump routed Hillary Clinton for the presidency. This surprise event became the bugle call for Google to wage war on "fake news" outlets, predominantly on the political right.
"Like being gay in the 1950s"
Just before Americans headed to the polls in last year"s presidential election, WikiLeaks delivered a well-timed steaming dump, revealing that Eric Schmidt had been working with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as early as April 2014. This news came courtesy of a leaked email from John Podesta, former chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, who wrote:
"I met with Eric Schmidt tonight. As David reported, he"s ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn"t pushing to run through one of his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn"t seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going..."
The implications of the CEO of the world"s most powerful company playing favorites in a presidential race are obvious, and make the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s resemble a rigged game of bingo at the local senior citizens center by comparison. Yet the dumbed-down world of American politics, which only seems to get excited when Republicans goof up, continued to turn on its wobbly axis as if nothing untold had occurred.
Before continuing our trip down memory lane, let"s fast forward a moment for a reality check. Google"s romance with the US political left is not a matter of conjecture. In fact, it has just become the subject of a released internal memo penned by one James Damore, a former Google engineer. In the 10-point memo, Damore discussed at length the extreme liberal atmosphere that pervades Google, saying that being a conservative in the Silicon Valley sweat shop was like "being gay in the 1950s."
"We have... this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves. Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s. These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are. And that’s a huge problem because there’s open discrimination against anyone who comes out of the closet as a conservative."
Beyond the quirky, laid back image of a Google campus, where "Googlers" enjoy free food and foot massages, lies a "monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves,"says Damore, who was very cynically fired from Google for daring to express a personal opinion. That is strange.
Although Google loudly trumpets its multicultural diversity in terms of its hiring policy, it clearly has a problem dealing with a diversity of opinion. That attitude does not seem to bode well for a search engine company that must remain impartial on all matters - political or otherwise.
Back to the 2016 campaign. Even CNN at the time was admitting that Google was Donald Trump"s "biggest enemy."
Indeed, not only was Schmidt apparently moonlighting for the DNC, his leftist company was actively shutting down information on the Republican front runner. At one point when Google users typed in a query for "presidential candidates," they got thousands of results for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Missing in action from the search results, however, was, yes, Donald Trump.
When NBC4 reached out to Google about the issue, a spokesperson said a "technical bug" was what caused Trump to disappear into the internet ether. Now, where have we heard the word "bug" before? It is worth wondering if this is what Eric Schmidt had in mind when he expressed his vision of a "one answer" Google search future?
In any case, this brings to the surface another disturbing question that is directly linked to the "fake news" accusations, which in turn is fueling Google"s crackdown on the free flow of news from the political right today.
In the run up to the 2016 presidential election, poll after poll predicted a Clinton landslide victory. Of course, nothing of the sort materialized, as even traditional Democratic strongholds, like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan pulled the lever for Trump. As the Economist reported: "On the eve of America’s presidential election, national surveys gave Hillary Clinton a lead of around four percentage points, which betting markets and statistical models translated into a probability of victory ranging from 70 percent to 99 percent."
The fact that Trump - in direct contradiction to what the polls had been long predicting - ended up winning by such a huge margin, there is a temptation to say the polls themselves were "fake news," designed to convince the US voter that a Clinton landslide victory was forthcoming. This could have been a ploy by the pollsters, many of whom are affiliated with left-leaning news corporations, by the way, for keeping opposition voters at home in the belief their vote wouldn"t matter. In fact, statisticians were warning of a "systemic mainstream misinformation" in poll data favoring Clinton in the days and weeks before Election day. Yet the Leftist brigade, in cahoots with the Googlers, were busy nurturing their own fervent conspiracy theory that "fake news" - with some help from the Russians, of course - was the reason for Hillary Clinton"s devastating defeat.
Who will guard us against the Google guardians?
Just one month after Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, purportedly on the back of "fake news," Google quietly launched Project Owl, the goal of which was to devise a method to "demote misleading, false and offensive articles online," according to a Bloomberg report. The majority of the crackdown will be carried out by machines. Now here is where we enter the rat"s nest. After all, what one news organization, or alternative news site, might consider legitimate news and information, another news group, possibly from the mainstream media, would dismiss as a conspiracy theory. And vice versa.
In other words, what we have here is a battle for the misty mountain top of information, and Google appears to be paving the way for its preferred candidate, which is naturally the mainstream media. In other words, Google has a dog in this fight, but it shouldn"t. Here is how they have succeeded in pushing for their crackdown on news and information.
It"s sad to see language like this from Hillary @Recode "I take responsibility for every decision I made but that"s not why we lost."
— Julian Assange ???? (@JulianAssange) May 31, 2017
The mainstream media almost immediately began peddling the fake news story as to why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. In fact, it even started before Clinton lost the election after Trump jokingly told a rally: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing... I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” The Democrats, of course, found no humor in the remark. Indeed, they began pushing the fake news story, with help from the likes of Amazon-owned Washington Post, that it was Russians whohacked the DNC email system and passed along the information to WikiLeaks, who then dumped it at the most inopportune time for the Democrats.
With this masterly sleight of hand, did you notice what happened? We are no longer talking about the whereabouts of Clinton"s estimated 33,000 deleted emails, nor are we discussing how the DNC worked behind the scenes to derail Bernie Sanders" chances at being a presidential candidate. Far worse, we are not considering the tragic fate of a young man named Seth Rich, the now-deceased DNC staffer who was gunned down in Washington, DC on July 10, 2016. Some news sites say Rich was preparing to testify against the DNC for "voter fraud," while others say that was contrived nonsense.
According to the mainstream media, in this case, Newsweek, only batshit crazy far-right conspiracy sites could ever believe Seth Rich leaked the Clinton emails.
"In the months since his murder, Rich has become an obsession of the far right, an unwilling martyr to a discredited cause," Newsweek commented. "On social media sites like Reddit and news outlets like World Net Daily, it is all but an article of faith that Rich, who worked for the Democratic National Committee, was the source who gave DNC emails to WikiLeaks, for which he was slain, presumably, by Clinton operatives. If that were to be true—and it very clearly isn’t—the faithful believe it would invalidate any accusations that Donald J. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia in tilting the election toward him."
Blame Russia
The reality is, we"ll probably never know what happened to Mr. Rich, but what we do know is that Russia has become the convenient fall guy for Clinton"s emails getting hacked and dumped in the public arena. We also know Google is taking advantage of this conspiracy theory (to this day not a thread of proof has been offered to prove Russia had anything to do with the release of the emails) to severely hinder the work of news sites - most of which sit on the right of the political spectrum.
Last November, just two weeks after Trump"s victory, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, addressed the question of "fake news" in a BBC interview, and whether it could have swayed the vote in Trump"s favor.
"You know, I think fake news as a whole could be an issue [in elections]. From our perspective, there should just be no situation where fake news gets distributed, so we are all for doing better here. So, I don"t think we should debate it as much as work hard to make sure we drive news to its more trusted sources, have more fact checking and make our algorithms work better, absolutely," he said.
Did you catch that? Following the tiresome rigmarole, the Google CEO said he doesn"t think "we should debate it as much as we work hard to make sure we drive news to its more trusted sources..."
That is a truly incredible comment, buried at the sea floor of the BBC article. How can the head of the largest search engine believe a democracy needn"t debate how Google determines what information, and by whom, is allowed into the public realm, thus literally shaping our entire worldview? To ask the question is to answer it...
"Just in the last two days we announced we will remove advertising from anything we identify as fake news," Pichai said.
And how will Google decide who the Internet baddies are? It will rely on "more than 15 additional expert NGOs and institutions through our Trusted Flagger program, including the Anti-Defamation League, the No Hate Speech Movement, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue," to determine what should be flagged and what should not.
Feeling better yet? This brings to mind the quaint Latin phrase, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves? especially since these groups also have their own heavy political axes to grind.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Pichai and his increasingly Orwellian company already stand accused of censorship, following the outrageous decision to bar former Congressman Ron Paul and his online news program, Liberty Report, from receiving advertising revenue for a number of videos which Paul recently posted.
Dr. Ron Paul would never be confused as a dangerous, far-right loony. Paul is a 12-term ex-congressman and three-time presidential candidate. However, he is popular among his supporters for views that often contradict those of Washington’s political establishment, especially on issues of war and peace. Now if squeaky clean Ron Paul can"t get a fair hearing before the Google/YouTube tribunal, what are chances for average commentators?
“We have no violence, no foul language, no political extremism, no hate or intolerance,” Daniel McAdams, co-producer of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, told RT America. “Our program is simply a news analysis discussion from a libertarian and antiwar perspective.”
McAdams added that the YouTube demonetization “creates enormous financial burdens for the program.”
Many other commentators have also been affected by the advert ban, including left-wing online blogger Tim Black and right-wing commentator Paul Joseph Watson. Their videos have registered millions of views.
“Demonetization is a deliberate effort to stamp out independent political commentary – from the left or the right,” Black told the Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray.
“It’s not about specific videos... It’s about pushing out the diversity of thought and uplifting major news networks such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.”
In light of this inquisition against free speech and free thought, it is no surprise that more voices are calling for Google, and other massive online media, like Facebook and Amazon, to become nationalized for the public good.
"If we don’t take over today’s platform monopolies, we risk letting them own and control the basic infrastructure of 21st-century society,"wrote Nick Srnicek, a lecturer in the digital economy at King’s College London.
It"s time for Google to take a stroll beyond its isolated Silicon Valley campus and realize there is a whole world of varying political opinion out there that demands a voice. Otherwise, it may find itself on the wrong side of history and time, a notoriously uninviting place known as 1984.
It was only a matter of time until this happened...
For years now, the politicos of the Left have embraced a perfectly symbiotic relationship with the "progressive" leaders of Silicon Valley. Tech titans, like Google"s Eric Schmidt who got very cozy with the Hillary Clinton campaign, have poured million of dollars of their tech fortunes into Democratic coffers all while colluding with elected officials, "independent" think tanks and "institutions of higher indoctrination" to ram their progressive agenda down the throats of the American public.
It was a great relationship for Democrats because Silicon Valley"s elites had all the money of Wall Street without the negative stigma...until now.
Google"s recent problems with censorship, which came first in the firing of James Damore and was quickly followed up by the firing of an "independent" research team at a think tank funded by Google, has exposed what many have known for some time but others were too enamored to see, namely that Silicon Valley companies like Google are every bit as motivated by their relentless pursuit of power and wealth as Wall Street...they"re just better at wrapping their motivations in a nice progressive bow.
Unfortunately, the cat is now out of the bag and it has forced a growing number of the Left"s most progressive politicians to distance themselves from America"s new breed of "evil corporations." As The Hill notes this morning, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Keith Ellison have already started to distance themselves:
Google is facing blowback after one of its most prominent critics was fired from a think tank funded by the tech giant.
The incident is raising new questions about Google’s influence over think tanks and academic research.
The controversy has caught the attention of lawmakers, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calling the firing “troubling” and warning academic institutions not to compromise their work for financial backers.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) also tweeted his support for the researchers pushed out of the think tank.
Open Markets does terrific work on monopoly power and inequality. Excited for their new chapter!https://t.co/5nTuUjjchK
Of course, as we pointed out last week, this latest backlash against Google comes after Barry Lynn, formerly a top researcher at New America, was fired after publishing a paper praising European Union antitrust regulators for fining Google nearly $3 billion for purportedly rigging its search algorithm to favor its own services over its rivals.
According to the New York Times, the New America Foundation has received more than $21 million in funding from Google, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt and his family’s foundation since the think tank was first established in 1999. The money helped establish New America as an “elite voice” in policy debates on the American left.
“But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.”
Slaughter, a close ally of the Clintons who’s best known for her 2012 Atlantic Cover Story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” quickly caved.
The statement disappeared from new America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure quickly rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington officers where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab. The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.”
Not surprisingly, Google has somehow managed to continue arguing with a straight face that they fund "independent research" with "undue influence." Of course, as Matt Bruenig, a former researcher at the liberal think tank Demos points out, "undue influence" isn"t actually required if their is an implicit understanding with donors that results in "self-censorship."
Google insists they fund think tanks independent of their corporate interests.
“We support hundreds of organizations that promote a free and open Internet, greater access to information, and increased opportunity,” Google spokesperson Riva Sciuto said in an emailed statement to The Hill.
“We don"t agree with every group 100% of the time, and while we sometimes respectfully disagree, we respect each group’s independence, personnel decisions, and policy perspectives.”
Google is not alone in the tech industry or in American business. Corporations pump large amounts of money into various research groups across different fields. Like Google, they say the research is conducted without undue influence.
Critics remain skeptical.
“Google spends a lot but says it’s not to influence research, which makes you think they waste a lot of money funding groups,” says Stoller.
"The influence operates on a self censorship level,” says Matt Bruenig a former researcher at the liberal think tank Demos, and founder at the People’s Policy Project, a crowdfunded think tank.
“If you’re an employee you understand the contours of what you should be writing, what you shouldn"t be writing based on what the donors are doing.”
Meanwhile, for anyone who has been paying attention, Yelp"s VP of public policy summed up the recent Google controversies the best:
“I"ve been working on Google antitrust for 6 years. This is both the most shocking & least surprising thing I"ve read."
The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling:The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was “imperiling the institution,” the Times reported, after he and his group had repeatedly criticized Google, a major funder of the think tank, for its market dominance.
The criticism of Google had culminated in Lynn posting a statement to the think tank’s website “applauding” the European Commission’s decision to slap the company with a record-breaking $2.7 billion fine for privileging its price-comparison service over others in search results. That post was briefly taken down, then republished. Soon afterward, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of New America, told Lynn that his group had to leave the foundation for failing to abide by “institutional norms of transparency and collegiality.”
Google denied any role in Lynn’s firing, and Slaughter tweeted that the “facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.”
Despite the conflicting story lines, the underlying premise felt familiar to me:
Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished.
I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job. In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then-new social network, Plus.
The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers.
This sounded like a news story to me. Google’s dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network.
I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes.
After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google.
With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting.
The Google guys explained how the new recommendation system will be a factor in search. “Universally, or just among Google Plus friends?” I asked. ‘Universal’ was the answer. “So if Forbes doesn’t put +1 buttons on its pages, it will suffer in search rankings?” I asked. Google guy says he wouldn’t phrase it that way, but basically yes.
(An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.)
Google promptly flipped out.This was in 2011, around the same time that a congressional antitrust committee was looking into whether the company was abusing its powers.
Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes.(I had signed no such agreement, hadn’t been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.)
It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.
I thought it was an important story, but I didn’t want to cause problems for my employer. And if the other participants in the meeting had in fact been covered by an NDA, I could understand why Google would object to the story.
Given that I’d gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down—a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this.
But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next:Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly. And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. It’s possible that Forbes, and not Google, was responsible for scrubbing the cache, but I frankly doubt that anyone at Forbes had the technical know-how to do it, as other articles deleted from the site tend to remain available through Google.
Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet.
I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance, but it’s part of why this episode has haunted me for years: The story Google didn’t want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google.
Google wouldn’t address whether it deliberately deep-sixed search results related to the story. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson sent a statement saying that Forbes removed the story because it was “not reported responsibly,” an apparent reference to the claim that the meeting was covered by a non-disclosure agreement. Again, I identified myself as a journalist and signed no such agreement before attending.
People who paid close attention to the search industry noticed the piece’s disappearance and wroteaboutit, wondering why it disappeared. Those pieces, at least, are still findable today.
As for how effective the strategy was, Google’s dominance in other industries didn’t really pan out for Plus. Six years later, the social network is a ghost town and Google has basically given up on it. But back when Google still thought it could compete with Facebook on social, it was willing to play hardball to promote the network.
Google started out as a company dedicated to ensuring the best access to information possible, but as it’s grown into one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, its priorities have changed. Even as it fights against ordinary people who want their personal histories removed from the web, the company has an incentive to suppress information about itself.
Google said it never urged New America to fire Lynn and his team. But an entity as powerful as Google doesn’t have to issue ultimatums. It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants, given the influence it wields.
Lynn and the rest of the team that left New America Foundation plan to establish a new nonprofit to continue their work. For now, they’ve launched a website called “Citizens Against Monopoly” that tells their story. It says that “Google’s attempts to shut down think tanks, journalists, and public interest advocates researching and writing about the dangers of concentrated private power must end.”
It’s safe to say they won’t be receiving funding from Google.
* * *
Update, September 1, 1:55 p.m.: Yesterday, we asked Google’s communications team for a response to this story. Initially, after reviewing contemporaneous internal Google emails about the Forbes story, two PR reps told us there was no way to know whether Google was responsible for deleting the cache and issued a short statement saying only that Forbes took down my story because it was “not reported responsibly.”
This morning, Google’s vice president of global communications, Rob Shilkin, emailed me to say definitively what two of his colleagues wouldn’t: “We had nothing to do with removing the article from the cache.” When I asked Shilkin how he came to that conclusion, he said it was based on old internal Google email threads. Since his colleagues had old email threads about the issue but never denied that Google took down the cache, I asked Shilkin if I could see the threads myself. He declined. His entire email, which he agreed to publish, is below.
Hi Kashmir
I wanted to clear the air on this. We have always enjoyed working respectfully with you and are sad to hear that you’ve carried this since 2011. I’m sorry about how this went down, and wanted to give you the tick-tock from our end.
From our perspective, this was a disagreement over whether a meeting was held under NDA. As you know, you attended a Forbes business meeting with the Google sales team, which was presenting on the (then) new +1 button. It didn’t strike our sales team as unusual that someone from Forbes’ editorial was in the meeting because they’d often attend these types of meetings - Editorial is often involved in a publication’s social strategy.
However, like most of our client meetings that discuss new features, it was held under an NDA (it sounds like Forbes didn’t inform you of this before you attended and had we known you were going to report on the meeting, we would have raised that concern).
Our sales team called their fellow attendees of the meeting from Forbes to express surprise that the article was based on a meeting held under NDA. I understand that one of our PR reps raised this concern to you, and then your editor. I understand that our PR rep asked that the piece come down from Forbes’ website, as it was reporting on a confidential business meeting.
Your editor agreed - he told our PR rep that the article was being removed because it involved reporting on an NDA meeting. As for the Google cache, it’s trivial for a website owner to request its cache to be cleared (see here). I assume this is what happened because we had nothing to do with removing the article from the cache. I hope our team has enough credibility, among those who work with us, that you know that we couldn’t and wouldn’t engage in this type of behavior - never have, never will.
You have long held our and the tech industry’s feet to the fire on privacy issues. And you have written (more than) a few critical stories about Google+ and many other things Google-related :) To my knowledge, never have we had any issues like this, with even the most critical story. On this one piece, there seems to have been an unfortunate misunderstanding over whether all the attendees at a meeting believed they were under an NDA.
I won’t pretend to love how you shared your concern about this incident but - after a stiff drink - I’m glad you raised it. I hope that in the intervening six years, we’ve re-earned your trust. And if not, we’ll keep trying.
About 10 years ago, Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who coined the term network neutrality, made this prescient comment: “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.”
Wu was right. And now, Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.
When Google was founded in 1998, it famously committed itself to the motto: “Don’t be evil.” It appears that Google may have lost sight of what being evil means, in the way that most monarchs do: Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are entitled to shut down dissent. As Lord Acton famously said, “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.” Those with too much power cannot help but be evil. Google, the company dedicated to free expression, has chosen to silence opposition, apparently without any sense of irony.
In recent years, Google has become greedy about owning not just search capacities, video and maps, but also the shape of public discourse. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Google has recruited and cultivated law professors who support its views. And as the New York Times recently reported, it has become invested in building curriculum for our public schools, and has created political strategy to get schools to adopt its products.
It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.
Google is forming into a government of itself, and it seems incapable of even seeing its own overreach. We, as citizens, must respond in two ways. First, support the brave researchers and journalists who stand up to overreaching power; and second, support traditional antimonopoly laws that will allow us to have great, innovative companies — but not allow them to govern us.
The mask has finally come off Google’s face, and what lurks underneath looks pretty evil.
2017 has represented a coming out party of sorts for Google and the control-freaks who run it. The company’s response to the James Damore controversy made it crystal clear that executives at Google are far more interested in shoving their particular worldview down the throats of the public, versus encouraging vibrant and lively debate. This is not a good look for the dominant search engine.
The creeping evilness of Google has been obvious for quite some time, but this troubling reality has only recently started getting the attention it deserves. The worst authoritarian impulses exhibited at the company appear to emanate from Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt, whose actions consistently seem to come from a very dark and unconscious place.
Today’s piece focuses on the breaking news that an important initiative known as Open Markets, housed within the think tank New America Foundation, has been booted from the think tank after major donor Google complained about its anti-monopoly stance. Open Markets was led by a man named Barry Lynn, who all of you should become familiar with.
The Huffington Post profiled him last year. Here’s some of what we learned:
There’s a solid economic rationale behind Washington’s new big thing. Monopolies and oligopolies are distorting the markets for everything from pet food to cable service. There’s a reason why cable companies have such persistently lousy customer-service ratings. They know you have few (if any) alternatives. Today, two-thirds of the 900 industries tracked by The Economist feature heavier concentration at the top than they did in 1997. The global economy is in the middle of a merger wave big enough to make 2015 the biggest year in history for corporate consolidation.
Most political junkies have never heard of the man chiefly responsible for the current Beltway antitrust revival: Barry C. Lynn. A former business journalist, Lynn has spent more than a decade carving out his own fiefdom at a calm, centrist Washington think tank called the New America Foundation. In the process, he has changed the way D.C. elites think about corporate power.
“Barry is the hub,” says Zephyr Teachout, a fiery progressive who recently clinched the Democratic nomination for a competitive House seat in New York. “He is at the center of a growing new ? I hesitate to call it a movement ? but a group of people who recognize that we have a problem with monopolies not only in our economy, but in our democracy.”
Many Southerners who relocate to the nation’s capital try to temper their accents for the elite crowd that dominates the District’s social scene. Lynn, a South Florida native, never shed his drawl. He pronounces “sonofabitch” as a single word, which he uses to describe both corrupt politicians and big corporations. He is a blunt man in a town that rewards caginess and flexibility. But like King, Lynn’s critique of monopolies does not reflect a disdain for business itself.
Lynn left Global Business for The New America Foundation in 2001 and began work on his first book, End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, which argues that globalization and merger mania had injected a new fragility into international politics. Disruptive events ? earthquakes, coups, famines, or at worst, war ? could now wreak havoc on U.S. products that had once been safely manufactured domestically. Production of anything from light bulbs to computers all could shut down without warning.
It was a frightening vision with implications for economic policy and national security alike. It was also ideologically inconvenient for the techno-utopian zeitgeist of its day. Lynn’s book landed on shelves about the same time as Thomas Friedman’s better-known tome, The World Is Flat, which declared globalization a triumph of innovation and hard work for anyone willing to do the hard work of innovating.
Today, Lynn’s predictions of market disruption and political unrest appear to have been ahead of their time. Early globalization champions, including Martin Wolf and Lawrence Summers, are rethinking their judgments of a decade ago. But Lynn turned several influential heads when his book was published. Thomas Frank, bestselling author of What’s The Matter With Kansas?, became a Lynn enthusiast. So did food writer Michael Pollan.
“He was writing about an issue that nobody was paying attention to, and he was doing it with a very strong sense of history,” Pollan says. “Barry understood antitrust going back to the trust-busters a century ago, and how our understanding of the issue shrank during the Reagan administration … The food movement is not very sophisticated on those issues.”
Lynn’s history nerd-dom is eccentric in a town that hyperventilates over every hour of the cable news cycle. Ask about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and Lynn will oblige you a polite sentence or two. Ask him about former Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis or William Howard Taft, and you’ll need to reschedule your dinner plans.
“He once asked me to read about Roman law for a piece on common carriage,” says Lina Khan, referencing a plank of net neutrality policy not typically associated with the Code of Justinian.
After he published his second book in 2010, Lynn began bringing on his own staff within New America. Khan was one of his first hires. Teachout, a Fordham University Law School professor, was another. Teachout eventually ran for office and published a book of her own on the history of corruption in America. Another of Lynn’s associates, Christopher Leonard, published a book on meat industry monopolies around the same time. These works shared a common theme: Monopolistic businesses create social problems beyond consumer price-gouging, from buying off politicians to degrading the quality of our food.
Analyzing the political power of companies with overwhelming market positions used to be a normal part of antitrust thinking. But over the decades, a narrower conception focused on consumer prices has taken hold in Washington. Even if anti-competitive behavior can be proved, according to this thinking, it’s not a problem unless it raises prices for consumers. Under this view, it’s not necessarily an antitrust problem, if, say, Amazon used its market position to force publishers into charging lower prices for books. If the result is lower prices, everything is fine. It would only become a problem if Amazon used its market power to raise prices.
That’s not how Lynn sees it. When the Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of Authors’ Representatives and Authors United went after Amazon in 2015 for requiring publishers to accept lower e-book prices, Lynn penned a 24-page position paper to the Department of Justice on their behalf. It wasn’t just a question of immediate consumer impact. Amazon’s market position was so dominant, he argued, that the company could restrict or cut off access to books from publishers it wanted to punish for rejecting its pricing requirements. It could “exercise control over the marketplace of ideas in ways that threaten not merely open markets but free speech.”
Monopolies, according to Lynn, are fundamentally political enterprises — not just players in a market.
As the Amazon conflict demonstrates, some of Lynn’s chief targets are tech giants. That makes him an odd fit for New America, which was founded in 1999 as Silicon Valley’s think tank in search of a “radical center,” as The New York Times put it. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is still on New America’s board of directors, yet Lynn consistently puts the company under the microscope.
When Warren blasted tech monopolies this summer, she was speaking at a conference that Lynn had organized. When Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) asked about “platform” monopolies at a Senate hearing in March, he was echoing Lynn’s objections to digital kingpins, including Amazon, Apple and Google.
But Lynn’s apostasy gets results. The Obama administration conferred with him on an anti-monopoly executive order this spring, and he helped work antitrust language into the 2016 Democratic Party platform. He can’t claim the same kind of direct credit for the Republican Party’s partial conversion to the antitrust cause. But his work is changing the way Washington thinks about corporate power, and that shift is having bipartisan repercussions.
Barry Lynn and his Open Markets initiative have been a thorn in the side of tech-monopoly plutocrats for a while, and Google apparently decided that it finally had enough.
As the The New York Times noted in a blockbuster article published earlier today:
WASHINGTON — In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a tech giant that shapes public policy debates with its enormous wealth is criticized.
The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left.
But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.
Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive chairman.
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.
While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”
Mr. Lynn, in an interview, charged that Ms. Slaughter caved to pressure from Mr. Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.
“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”
It is difficult to overstate Mr. Lynn’s influence in raising concerns about the market dominance of Google, as well as of other tech companies such as Amazon and Facebook. His Open Markets initiative organized a 2016 conference at which a range of influential figures — including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — warned of damaging effects from market consolidation in tech.
In the run-up to that conference, Ms. Slaughter and New America’s lead fund-raiser in emails to Mr. Lynn indicated that Google was concerned that its positions were not going to be represented, and that it was not given advanced notice of the event.
“We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,” Ms. Slaughter wrote in an email to Mr. Lynn, urging him to “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”
After initially eschewing Washington public policy debates, which were seen in Silicon Valley as pay-to-play politics, Google has developed an influence operation that is arguably more muscular and sophisticated than that of any other American company. It spent $9.5 million on lobbying through the first half of this year — more than almost any other company. It helped organize conferences at which key regulators overseeing investigations into the company were presented with pro-Google arguments, sometimes without disclosure of Google’s role.
Among the most effective — if little examined — tools in Google’s public policy toolbox has been its funding of nonprofit groups from across the political spectrum. This year, it has donated to 170 such groups, according to Google’s voluntary disclosures on Google’s website. While Google does not indicate how much cash was donated, the number of beneficiaries has grown exponentially since it started disclosing its donations in 2010, when it gave to 45 groups.
Some tech lobbyists, think tank officials and scholars argue that the efforts help explain why Google has mostly avoided damaging regulatory and enforcement decisions in the United States of the sort levied by the European Union in late June.
Google’s willingness to spread cash around the think tanks and advocacy groups focused on internet and telecommunications policy has effectively muted, if not silenced, criticism of the company over the past several years, said Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. His group, which does not accept any corporate funding, has played a leading role in calling out Google and other tech companies for alleged privacy violations. But Mr. Rotenberg said it is become increasingly difficult to find partners in that effort as more groups have accepted Google funding.
“There are simply fewer groups that are available to speak up about Google’s activities that threaten online privacy,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “The groups that should be speaking up aren’t.”
As a result of its actions in recent years, I believe Google represents a clear threat to democracy and freedom of expression in America. The good news is that Barry Lynn and his team at Open Markets will continue their work independently at a new group called Citizens Against Monopoly.
You can sign a letter of support for this new initiative and contribute to it financially (I have done both), by clicking the image below.
Let’s make sure this story results in the the ultimate Streisand effect, thus bringing the crucial issue of anti-trust to the forefront of the American political conversation where it belongs.
Monopoly capitalism is not a “left” or “right” issue, it’s an issue nearly everyone can stand united on irrespective of where you lie on the political spectrum. Concentration is too high in too many industries, and this reality is starting to have negative repercussions on our basic freedoms. It’s long past time that we tackle this issue with the seriousness it deserves and start to push back aggressively as a people.
