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posted by takyon on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the one-dollar-one-vote dept.

According to The Guardian Google is a major funder of the New America Foundation, some researchers of which criticized monopolies and lauded the EU for levying a record fine for Google for antitrust reasons. This apparently wasn't received well at the advertisement company and subsequently the team who did the research got the boot.

Now might be a good time to consider your dependence on all services GOOG.

The New America Foundation is one of the leading left-leaning policy groups in the US and is led by Anne-Marie Slaughter, an author, foreign policy analyst and political scientist. In June, Barry Lynn, a senior fellow who led the thinktank's Open Markets initiative, wrote a blogpost praising the EU's decision to levy a record €2.42bn ($2.7bn) fine on Google for breaching antitrust rules and abusing its market dominance. "Google's market power is one of the most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today," Lynn wrote.

According to The New York Times, shortly after the post was published Schmidt, who chaired New America until 2016, contacted Slaughter to communicate his displeasure.

The blogpost was temporarily removed from New America's website before being reposted. Days later, Slaughter told Lynn that "the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways", according to an email from Slaughter to Lynn obtained by the Times. Slaughter said the decision was "in no way based on the content of your work" although she she accused Lynn of "imperiling the institution as a whole".

New America has received roughly $21m from Google, Schmidt and his family foundation since 1999. The organisation's main conference room in Washington DC is called the Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.

Lynn and his 10-strong team have now set up Citizens Against Monopoly. "Is Google trying to censor journalists and researchers who fight dangerous monopolies?" the website asks. "Sadly, the answer is: YES."


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @09:57AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @09:57AM (#562043)

    I would agree. My opinion of Google has turned dramatically for the worse. My friend is a former senior Googler and it seems even his rose colored glasses are slipping.

    I expect we're going to see the brain drain that happened to Microsoft happen to Google. When I was graduating Microsoft was 'the' company to work for - that or a Valley startup. Years of Balmer, his stack ranking system, and a company that generally became less innovative and more 'corporate' (for lack of a better word) changed that surprisingly swift. And Google is now following in their footsteps.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:31PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:31PM (#562086)

    I've been interviewed twice. I turned down each offer; it would have resulted in a move across the country, for less pay, in a higher priced and smaller home, for a longer commute, with the benefit of.. working at google and all of those on-site benefits.

    Sadly, I like to not work when the work day is over. I may do things related to the industry (which probably attracted their attention), but I need to be away from work to be able to enjoy that... and not stress over the less pay, longer commute if I do leave, higher cost of living, and being near no one I know.

    Almost like they designed an attractive Hotel California sort of place where it is pointless to leave once you're trapped anyway. (Never mind any ideological differences... i can't say I want to be paid to invade privacy more effectively as part of my full-time job, especially if I am posting as an anonymous coward)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:39PM (#562213)

      This summed up both my reason for not voting for Obama in his first election, as well as my reason for telling people it was time to get off google products, whoever you are (except android, so long as you strip out google play and install f-droid asap, it is still quite the good phone OS, compared to its predecessor smart phones, or alternatives. iOS is nice, but the apple monoculture and lockdown ruins it for me.) A friend was at the one of the northern offices (portland or seattle or somewhere rainy.) when they had Obama roll through during his presidential campaign. Besides having all the questions carefully selected and shilled from 'members of the audience', they asked him about programming and he said 'I know not to use a bubble sort.' Which of course earned him instant love with everyone. I suggested that it was all carefully calculated and that was probably the first and last time he'd ever heard of a bubble sort (unless you could prove he'd had an introduction to programming class, which based on his major and period he was in college was unlikely.) Needless to say 8 years later, both Obama and Google let us down as Authoritarian leftists with the exact same sort of selfish childishness I generally expect from conservatives, like our good and opinionated buddy TMB there :)