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Following a controversy over Google's Eric Schmidt pressuring the New America Foundation into removing a critical blog post and firing the scholar who wrote it, a former Forbes journalist now working at Gizmodo has written about an incident in which Google allegedly pressured Forbes to kill a negative story:
The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.
Hill thought that seemed like a big story, so she contacted Google's PR shop for confirmation. Google essentially confirmed the story, and so Hill ran with it under the headline: "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers."
Hill described what happened next:
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.
If true, does it reflect worse on Google or the clickbait and scriptwall outlet Forbes?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @02:30PM (4 children)
It's all fun and games when GOOG comes to you and says "Do you want some money" because who doesn't want money, right? But now you are beholden to them and actors with large pockets give you so much money that you become dependent on them, like mozilla did. It's when they have you in their pocket like that, that they pull your funding, exactly the same like a choke-chain on a dog, just to show you who's boss!
Instead of these organizations taking the easy way out and accepting large sums of money from corporations, they should do proper fund-raising and get small donations from more donors. It's like growing mono-culture bananas vs doing proper crop-rotation and growing different types of produce. I remember something about eggs and a single basket and all...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @02:33PM (2 children)
That's the story with the Foundation. Here no money was exchanging hands but google was simply abusing its monopoly position.
"Nice web site you seem to have, shame if something was to happen to it..."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 02 2017, @02:50PM (1 child)
"Here no money was exchanging hands"
Not directly, maybe, but money was changing hands. Forbe's income was/is at least partially dependent on Google search results. Google threatened to cut that income. Blackmail is blackmail, even if cash funds aren't transferred directly between the perpetrator and the victim.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @06:18PM
Given that google basically has monopoly status in the search engine industry, it seems like US and EU officials should be all over this like stink on shit. This is a clear example of a corporation financially and legally pressuring a company to acquiesce based on their market domination.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @03:36PM
Yes, it's all fun and games, until some cowgirl kicks your ass.
http://horseloversgifts.com/productimages/4374.jpg [horseloversgifts.com]
Just because we are wearing lipstick doesn't mean we can't kick your ass!
Tommy Lee quotes