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Google, Being Evil Again

Internet giant's grubby fingerprints are all over mass firing of its think-tank critics
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The New York Post editorial board lets Google have it, deservedly. Excerpt:

The New America Foundation says it didn’t fire all 10 members of its Open Markets Program over a post critical of Google, which has given NAF more than $21 million. But all signs say otherwise.

Which is one more reason to worry about the vast power of the Silicon Valley giants.

According to The New York Times, Google chairman Eric Schmidt vented his fury over the post to foundation head Anne- Marie Slaughter, who soon e-mailed unit chief Barry Lynn that his team was “imperiling the institution as a whole” and had to go.

Lynn’s post cheered the $2.7 billion fine that European anti-trust regulators imposed on the search-engine company for favoring its own services over rivals, as “protecting the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend.”

He urged “US enforcers” to “build upon this important precedent, both in respect to Google and to other dominant platform monopolists including Amazon,” citing “traditional American approach to network monopoly, which is to cleanly separate ownership of the network from ownership of the products and services sold on that network.”

More:

Happily, Open Markets will continue as an independent outfit, chaired by New York uber-progressive Zephyr Teachout, who has belatedly noticed that Google spends vastly more on lobbying and on influencing thought than do the likes of the Koch brothers.

The Post goes on to say that fighting monopolies is something both conservatives and liberals can agree on. That’s true. The book to read right now is Move Fast And Break Things, by Jonathan Taplin. In it, he argues that the immense power over their industries that Google, Facebook, and Amazon wield is bad for democracy.

Eric Schmidt and Google just provided us with an example of that.

See, trust-busting is the kind of populism that a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle could get behind. Instead, our pseudo-populist president surrounds himself with Goldman Sachs guys. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, who tried to work with the White House, describes what happened like this:

“You had two factions in the White House. You had one faction that actually had some of the policies that we would have supported on trade, on infrastructure — but they turned out to be racist. And on the other hand, you had people that weren’t racist, but they were Wall Streeters. And the Wall Streeters began to dominate the administration and have moved his agenda back to everything he fought against in the election.”

Whether or not you agree with the “racist” line, I don’t see how there’s any doubt that the rest of what he said is true.

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