Google's remarkably close relationship with Obama's White House

[Winehole23]

Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects.


Precisely how much influence this buys Google isn’t always clear. But consider that over in the European Union, Google is now facing two major an rust charges for abusing its dominance in mobile operating systems and search. By contrast, in the U.S., a strong case to sanction Google was quashed by a presidentially appointed commission.


It’s a relationship that bears watching. “Americans know surprisingly little about what Google wants and gets from our government,” said Anne Weismann, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog organization. Seeking to change that, Weismann’s group is spearheading a data transparency project about Google’s interactions in Washington.


The Intercept teamed up with Campaign for Accountability to present two revealing data sets from that forthcoming project: one on the number of White House meetings attended by Google representatives, and the second on the revolving door between Google and the government.


As the interactive charts accompanying this article show, Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.



No other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government. According to an analysis of White House data, the Google lobbyist with the most White House visits, Johanna Shelton, visited 128 times, far more often than lead representatives of the other top-lobbying companies — and more than twice as often, for instance, as Microsoft’s Fred Humphries or Comcast’s David Cohen

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/...in-two-charts/

[Winehole23]

Another potential conflict arises from the enormous amount of data that Google and the government each have stored on American citizens. Google recently acknowledged having mined the data of student users of its education apps, and has been accused repeatedly of violating user privacy in other contexts. An overly close partnership risks Google putting its data in the government’s hands or gaining access to what the government has collected.


When the federal government and a private company share the same worldview, get the same insights from the same groups of people, the policy drift can occur with nobody explicitly choosing the direction. It just seems like the right thing to do.
And there is no doubt that Google’s rise in Washington has coincided with public policy that is friendlier to the company.


Most notably, Google has faced questions for years about exercising its market power to squash rivals, infringing on its users’ privacy rights, favoring its own business affiliates in search results, and using patent law to create barriers to compe ion. Even Republican senators like Orrin Hatch have called out Google for its practices.


In 2012, staff at the Federal Trade Commission recommended filing an rust charges after determining that Google was engaging in anti-compe ive tactics and abusing its monopoly. A staff report that was later leaked said Google’s conduct “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets.”

[Winehole23]

The Wall Street Journal noted that Google’s White House visits increased right around that time. And in 2013, the presidentially appointed commissioners of the FTC overrode their staff, voting unanimously not to file any charges.

[Winehole23]

[Spurtacular]

REMARKABLE!

[Winehole23]

REMARKABLE!

Derp....

[Winehole23]

Every time I look back Obama looks worse, and I already thought he was pretty bad.

Time will tell whether Lina Khan and Tim Wu are window dressing or the real deal.

Few moments in the power struggle between Washington and Silicon Valley have inspired more anger and bafflement than one in January 2013, when an rust regulators appointed by former President Barack Obama declined to sue Google.

The decision still rankles the company’s rivals, who have watched the search giant continue to amass power over smartphones, data-hoovering devices and wide swaths of the internet, unimpeded by laws meant to deter monopolies. It has fueled some lawmakers’ calls to overhaul the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that spent 19 months investigating Google’s efforts to overpower the compe ion — and critics say, blinked.

The commission has never disclosed the full scope of its probe nor explained all its reasons for letting Google’s behavior slide.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...igation-475573

[Winehole23]

But 312 pages of confidential internal memos obtained by POLITICO reveal what the FTC’s lawyers and economics experts were thinking — including assumptions that were contradictory at the time and many that turned out to be incorrect about the internet’s future, Google’s efforts to dominate it and the harm its rivals said they were suffering from the company’s actions. The memos show that at a crucial moment when Washington’s regulators might have had a chance to stem the growth of tech’s biggest giants, preventing a handful of trillion-dollar corporations from dominating a rising share of the economy, they misread the evidence in front of them and left much of the digital future in Google’s hands.

[hater]

Every time I look back Obama looks worse, and I already thought he was pretty bad.

Time will tell whether Lina Khan and Tim Wu are window dressing or the real deal.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...igation-475573