New Report Reveals Google's Extensive Financial Support for European Academics and Think Tanks
Today, Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog group focused on public accountability, released a new report revealing how Google has paid tens of millions of euros to European academic institutions over the past decade to develop an influential network of friendly European academics who write research papers supporting the tech giant's business interests.
CfA Executive Director Daniel E. Stevens stated, "Google's lavish funding of academics and think tanks helps the company exert a subtle and hidden form of influence on European policymakers. As Europe looks to crack down on Google's excesses, regulators need to be aware that a good deal of the academic research defending the company is written by Google-funded institutions."
Spanning the length and breadth of Europe, Google-funded think thanks have published hundreds of papers on issues central to the company's business, from antitrust enforcement to regulation governing privacy, copyright, jobs, and the "right to be forgotten." Events organized by Google-funded institutions have attracted many of the European policymakers charged with creating and enforcing regulation affecting the company.
One of the donors to the Campaign for Accountability is Oracle.
Also at Politico.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isj on Saturday March 17 2018, @04:12PM
Supporting academia financially - great. Creating shills that way - not so great.
Google is funding some organisations considerably, eg. Alexander von Humboldt Institute for internet and society. A German documentary highlighted this: https://youtu.be/pGpvtKYZPGw?t=30m17s [youtu.be] The whole documentary is very interesting and covers other aspects, eg businesses being vulnerable to small changes in the result ranking, Google providing software to newspapers, ...