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Again, you see these people as "the places they work for". He wasn't "handed a position". He applied for a job, got interviewed, and took it. What favor do yo

Again, you see these people as "the places they work for". He wasn't "handed a position". He applied for a job, got interviewed, and took it. What favor do you think happened here, or anywhere? What evidence do you have of this? No, i can't see a general problem with antitrust lawyers, or really, any lawyer deciding where to work. Private law firms hire people with government experience precisely because they know how it works. Not because they want favors, but because they have experience. The same is true of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, whoever. This is no different than hiring from "industry". The industry of antitrust lawyers includes government lawyers. You try to hire the best, regardless of who they work for. If your goal is to prevent favors from being done, prevent favors from being done[1]. I don't see why that has any general relation to job mobility. People either have integrity or not. Either they make decisions and voice opinions without regard to future career mobility or not. If they generally don't, you are pretty much screwed no matter what you do here - you need to fix people, you aren't really going to fix the process[1]. If they generally do, than you should just worry about the outliers.. [1] Imagine for a second, you go so far as to have a neutral committee review every person who changes jobs, including all correspondence, video tapes of interviews, whatever. Do you believe this would fix it? No, of course not, it'll just drive any bad behavior further into the dark. It would literally not stop any problem. If you ban job mobility, would that stop any problems? Given the number of senators/congressman/etc indicted for having their houses renovated for free, etc, i'm going to go with "no". If your problem is integrity, people without integrity are going to be much more creative about the favors they get, how they are done, etc. Changing job mobility will not change this. As evidence: It literally hasn't, in the past 200 years. The only thing it does is hurt the honest people.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
We're talking about people who directly move in and out of Google or Google contractors, and places which have a immediate and direct conflict of interest with Google. Which inexplicably, almost without other justification, seems to avoid any sort of legal action against it. And this isn't a one-off case of one employee moving around. It's a significant, recurring process. And in the case of Joshua Wright, long before he revolved his way into an FTC position, he was already receiving money under the table to fabricate "academic studies" supporting Google's antitrust position, which they then used as expert references to their claims. We already have a corrupt individual who's engaged in unethical practices on Google's behalf, which then also moved into a government position where he had an extreme ability to protect Google from government action. We've long understood that transparency in government in terms of where money changes hands, where people are employed, and similar factors are key in preventing corruption. People may not be the places they work for, but they are representatives of their employers. If this wasn't understood, political donations wouldn't require the disclosure of a donor's employer. You seem to be suggesting we should dismiss our entire understanding of how corruption occurs, because the evidence points very clearly that corruption is happening between our government and Google. Honest people, unfortunately, are not involved here. Note for other readers: DannyBee is a Googler and claims in his profile to be a lawyer, so presumably has worked with the Google, FTC, and WSG&R people discussed here.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

We're talking about people who directly move in and out of Google or Google contractors, and places which have a immediate and direct conflict of interest with Google. Which inexplicably, almost without other justification, seems to avoid any sort of legal action against it. And this isn't a one-off case of one employee moving around. It's a significant, recurring process. And in the case of Joshua Wright, long before he revolved his way into an FTC position, he was already receiving money under the table to fabricate "academic studies" supporting Google's antitrust position, which they then used as expert references to their claims. We already have a corrupt individual who's engaged in unethical practices on Google's behalf, which then also moved into a government position where he had an extreme ability to protect Google from government action. We've long understood that transparency in government in terms of where money changes hands, where people are employed, and similar factors are key in preventing corruption. People may not be the places they work for, but they are representatives of their employers. If this wasn't understood, political donations wouldn't require the disclosure of a donor's employer. You seem to be suggesting we should dismiss our entire understanding of how corruption occurs, because the evidence points very clearly that corruption is happening between our government and Google. Honest people, unfortunately, are not involved here. Note for other readers: DannyBee is a Googler and claims in his profile to be a lawyer, so presumably has worked with the Google, FTC, and WSG&R people discussed here.