Why is Google spending record sums on lobbying Washington?
Figures released last week show that Google spent a record amount of almost $6m lobbying in Washington DC in the past three months, putting the Silicon Valley behemoth on track to be the top corporate lobbying spending in the US. Last year it ranked number two, behind Comcast.
Given the increased antitrust scrutiny that is coming from the Democrats new Better Deal policy platform, Donald Trumps random tweets attacking fellow tech giant Amazon for its connection to the Washington Post, and his adviser Steve Bannons recent comments that Google and Facebook should be regulated as utilities, it is likely Google will only increase its lobbying expenditure in the next few months.
The largest monopoly in America, Google controls five of the top six billion-user, universal web platforms search, video, mobile, maps and browser and leads in 13 of the top 14 commercial web functions, according to Scott Cleland at Precursor Consulting.
As the controversial Trump-supporting PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel points out, companies like Google dont like to advertise this fact. They lie to protect themselves, Thiel says. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized and attacked. Since they very much want their monopoly profits to continue unmolested, they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly usually by exaggerating the power of their (nonexistent) competition.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/30/google-silicon-valley-corporate-lobbying-washington-dc-politics
Big Brother is really watching you
Dr Hobbitstein
(6,568 posts)They're one of the bigger players on our side of that field.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)Fozzledick
(3,860 posts)It's been replaced with a dysfunctional stub with nearly all of its content and basic functionality removed.
Clarity2
(1,009 posts)I was at one time suspicious of Google, because I saw a pattern of RW websites coming up in first 2 pages of search results when big stories popped, but now I believe that is actually the RW manipulating google results.
I also saw this google employee conference and that sealed the deal...they are on our side:
Frank Schaeffer is an ex-evangalist who is against religious & ideological extremism.
Many companies lobby the government for good. Bill Gates met with Trump at least once, and probably more, which no doubt was to plead or convince Trump do the right thing (which of course falls on deaf ears).
hedda_foil
(16,371 posts)So we get mostly reputable news sources for our searches and they get all the alt right, pro T results.
dalton99a
(81,426 posts)It's naive to think Google/Alphabet is an altruistic organization