A
few days
after
last year’s midterm election, a Google policy manager and lobbyist sent
an email to a congressional staffer with a link to a
blog
post
on the right-wing news site Red State, written under the name The Real
DC. In the post, the author accuses Google’s competitor Yelp of prodding
President Trump to tweet a “professionally designed” video about
Google’s alleged bias, which The Real DC calls “fake news” because it
“bears many similarities” to content produced by Yelp.
In
the email, a copy of which was viewed by WIRED, Ed An, the Google
lobbyist, said he does not typically share articles from Red State but
thought the staffer would find this one interesting.
Neither
Red State, its publisher Townhall Media, nor its owner Salem Media Group
responded to repeated questions about The Real DC. In a statement, An,
the Google lobbyist, said he has no knowledge “of the author who goes by
The Real DC.” Yelp vice president of public policy Luther Lowe denied
any connection to the video or tweet.
The
Real DC
appears to have posted seven times on Red State. The posts touch on a
range of policy issues, such as mortgages, ticket sales, and shareholder
rights. All are topics that align with the clientele of a Washington,
DC, public affairs firm called
CLS
Strategies,
which first worked with Google
in
2008,
when Google was trying to stop Microsoft’s potential acquisition of
Yahoo. On its website, CLS lists as a client the Computer and
Communications Industry Association, a trade association in which Google
is an influential member. The Real DC first posted about Yelp in March
2018, after Lowe, a vocal anti-Google instigator, called CCIA the
“shadiest front group for Google.”
CLS
declined to comment. CCIA president Ed Black said, “A good look at our
website and history will show our strong independent streak amid a
diverse membership." CCIA’s relationship with CLS ended in August 2017.
A
spokesperson for Google said the company would never ask someone to
write an anonymous piece. "We are transparent about our policy work—we
disclose all significant affiliations and grants on our
transparency
page
and we require all people whose work or research we fund to disclose
that fact,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Still,
the email offers insight into how Google, a shrewd Washington player,
has shifted into overdrive and adapted its approach as calls to regulate
Big Tech have grown louder.
In
the latest sign of the more hostile environment for tech, Democratic
presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren last week issued a
far-reaching
plan
to break up dominant tech platforms; she suggested Google be required to
unwind its acquisitions of Waze, Nest, and DoubleClick. Rebukes from the
right are just as vehement. During a congressional hearing
on
monopolies
last week, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) lit into tech companies.
“When they spy on their consumers, when they take data without
disclosing it, when they use it for things that consumers have not
approved, I mean every day brings some creepy new revelation about these
companies’ behaviors,” he said.
At
the hearing, Hawley, who launched an
investigation
into Google
while he was Missouri attorney general, also challenged Joshua Wright, a
former Trump adviser and professor at George Mason University, who wrote
academic research
funded
indirectly by Google
and criticized a Federal Trade Commission probe into Google before
joining the agency as a commissioner from 2013 to 2015. “As someone who
comes from the conservative or libertarian side of the street, should we
be concerned” about cronyism from large companies, Hawley asked. On
Tuesday, Hawley cosponsored
a
bill
to prevent tech companies from collecting data on children. Wright says
his views have "attracted like-minded supporters" as the antitrust
debate intensifies.
Google
is very active in shaping public policy. Last year, the company reported
spending
$21
million
on federal lobbying, more than any other company in America. Google was
also the highest-spending corporate lobbyist
in
2017.
Over
the past year or so, the network of academics, think tanks, trade
organizations, and advocacy groups funded by Google has repeatedly come
to its defense at key moments, such as after Warren’s broadside, the
days
after
the midterm elections,
and the weeks surrounding
Google
CEO Sundar
Pichai’s
December appearance before Congress. When Trump took office in January
2017, Google listed 141 organizations that receive funding from the
company’s public policy division. Since then the number has more than
doubled, to 349.
Op-eds
by antitrust and privacy experts sympathetic to Google’s views have
appeared on
right-wing
and cable news sites.
In the editorials, the authors frame populist fervor to regulate Big
Tech as the work of unserious
“hipster
antitrust”
activists who don’t understand the law, and argue that consumers are
better off with the status quo.
“Google
is much savvier at this game than Comcast or AT&T in that it
doesn’t pay for strict quid pro quos. Its strategy relies on social
capture.”
—Congressional
staffer
Scholars
and experts may hold these positions independent of financial incentives
from tech companies like Google, but both regulators and the public are
sometimes left in the dark about potential conflicts of interest. Larry
Downes, project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and
Public Policy, coauthored an op-ed in
The
Washington Post
in January about the tech backlash “going askew.” Google’s donation to
the Georgetown Center was not noted on its transparency page until about
10 days later, according to records from Archive.org. A Google
spokesperson said the company updates its page twice a year. Downes did
not respond to a request for comment. Georgetown said as a private
university it does not disclose donor information.
Warren’s
post last week brought out some of Google’s reliable defenders, like
Geoffrey Manne, head of the International Center for Law &
Economics, a nonprofit research group that receives money from Google;
Wright was previously director of research there, and coauthored some
papers with Manne. Manne’s conflicts of interest have previously
attracted attention, including
New
York Times
articles in
2015
and
2016
that mentioned funding the center received from Comcast during the net
neutrality debate.
A
rebuttal
to Warren,
coauthored by Manne, argued that Google might stop investing in
improving its products if it is regulated. He said a decline in business
dynamism, cited by Warren, could be because entrepreneurs want to sell
their startups to big companies, contradicting founders who say they
would rather become the next Mark Zuckerberg than sell to him.
Google
began stepping up its Washington game around 2011, as the FTC
investigated whether the company was improperly exploiting its dominance
in search.
The
Wall Street Journal
reported that FTC staffers found that Google engaged in anticompetitive
behavior that harmed rivals and users, but in 2013 the commission
decided not to bring charges against Google, which made some voluntary
changes. Around this time, Google began
courting
conservatives
to mitigate concerns over its close ties to the Obama administration.
The
company has also excelled in less formal efforts to influence
conversation, through donations to academics, think tanks, trade
organizations, and advocacy groups, on both the left and the right, that
steer debate toward policy positions that benefit Google in conferences,
congressional hearings, and editorials that often do not disclose a
speaker’s financial ties to Google.
A
person familiar with Google’s strategy for influencing public debate
says the company generally doesn’t seek to change experts’ thinking but,
rather, to underwrite their time and encourage them to be more vocal on
issues important to Google. Google may pre-vet op-eds and ask that
certain statements be made stronger or weaker, which seems small but
ends up having a big impact, the person said. Google did not respond to
a request for comment on reviewing op-eds.
“Google
is much savvier at this game than Comcast or AT&T in that it doesn’t
pay for strict quid pro quos. Its strategy relies on social capture,”
one congressional staffer told WIRED. Google finds an organization that
seems to share Google’s values and then donates money without a specific
ask, the staffer said.
But
Google’s tactics backfired last year, when its employees revolted
against the company’s sponsorship of the Conservative Political Action
Conference, attended by
white
nationalists and members of the anti-LGBT movement,
and where speakers included French nationalist politician Marine Le Pen.
Google
did not sponsor this year’s conference, held in late February and early
March. But Google was still there, indirectly. The company funds at
least eight think tanks and nonprofits whose officials spoke or who
sponsored events at CPAC, including Americans for Tax Reform, the
Heritage Foundation, National Review Institute, and the Federalist
Society. Google has been funding the American Conservative Union, the
organization behind CPAC, since 2012.
In
a statement, Google said, "We have very openly engaged with policymakers
and organizations from across the political spectrum for over a decade
to advocate for policies that help consumers and our employees, and that
keep the internet an engine for innovation and economic opportunity."
The company’s public policy director, Adam Kovacevich, laid out the
team’s tactics last year during an employee meeting to explain Google’s
sponsorship of CPAC, according to an audio recording
previously
reported
by WIRED. “[W]e try to influence policymakers by allying with the people
that they listen to, the network of advocacy groups, think tanks,
grassroots organizations on both the left and the right,” Kovacevich
said. “If we want policymakers to help us when we have a bad bill or a
regulation pending, we have to build relationships with them ahead of
time. And so a big part of our work in the DC office across all of our
team is building relationships not only with the people in power but
also the people who influence them.”
Google’s
influence is extensive. During a February hearing on
protecting
consumer privacy
in front of a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee,
three of the five speakers represented groups that receive money from
Google: American Enterprise Institute, Center for Democracy &
Technology, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau. A fourth represented
the Business Roundtable.
Georgetown
law professor Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, said that when EPIC filed complaints with the FTC to
block Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007 and Nest in 2014,
Google’s response was to pump money into universities, think tanks, and
nongovernmental groups. “Money buys silence,” Rotenberg says. “Google
doesn’t need the experts to agree with them. They only need them to look
the other way.”
Experts
who defend tech companies in Washington generally say they are not
influenced by Google’s donations. Matt Stoller, of the Open Markets
Institute, a left-leaning think tank that
favors
tough
antitrust
enforcement,
finds that curious. “It’s funny that economists think that incentives
work on everybody but economists,” Stoller says.
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