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Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign

161 points by NN88 9y ago

NN88 9y ago
Full Text: http://archive.is/8pkAH http://archive.is/8pkAH
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Sadly, this has been a known fact for a long time, and it never gets a lot of attention. Joshua Wright, the former FTC Commissioner, was one of the professors previously paid to write 'academic studies' for Google.
surveilmebro 9y ago
To be fair, similar tactics are standard practice in many non-tech fields: pharmaceuticals, law, and agronomy to name a few. What's perhaps different here is that researchers may not be accustomed to disclosing financial support that is only weakly connected to the research in question.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Sure. Nobody's saying that Google's invented a new strategy here. We've all known Phillip Morris, Monsanto, and the like to do this, but generally such companies have been derided for the behavior. People are generally hesitant to group Google in the same class of corporate actor.
  - bykovich2 9y ago
    The notion that a given multinational billion-dollar syndicate is not going to engage in the behavior characteristic of multinational billion-dollar syndicates because it's run by nerds instead of suits seems, at the very least, suspect.
    - lovemenot 9y ago
      So let's go ahead and proselytise this cynicism until the general population is as distrustful of their new corporate champions as they are of their now-reviled older champions.
- blub 9y ago
  It's difficult to understand the purpose of your comment except as a Google apology, which I'm sure they can do fine without, seeing that they're a huge corporation paying a lot of money to have the friendly ear of government representatives. Yes, there's a lot of things going wrong in the world. Today we discuss Google, tomorrow Microsoft, etc. There's enough for everybody.
gnicholas 9y ago
> The money didn’t influence his work, Mr. Heald said, and Google issued no conditions: “They said, ‘If you take this $20,000 and open up a doughnut shop with it—we’ll never give you any more money—but that’s fine.’” At a glance, this seems like the funds are no-strings-attached. But when you think for a minute, you realize it's the exact opposite. Google is saying that if they don't like what you do with the money, they won't give you any more — but if they do like what you do with it then you might get more. This incentivizes the professor to use the money to do things that Google would like, which is the opposite of no-strings-attached. There technically are no strings attached to this money, but the possibility of future payments (which ranged from $5k to $400k) is a pretty big enticement.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  This is one of my favorites: > He said Google was careful to say the checks came with no requirements: “It was a gift. Recipients can do what they want.” I have never heard a statement so akin to organized crime as this. Things like saying how it'd 'be unfortunate if something happened to someone' or how they 'gave him a suggestion'. The fact that they are being so careful to avoid explicitly stating they paid professors for supporting work makes me wonder... is there actually a crime here they're committing? I didn't think there really was, but if there wasn't, I doubt Google would be so coy. Google Transparency Project tweeted that Eric Schmidt used one such paper when testifying to Congress without disclosing their financial interest: https://twitter.com/GTP_updates/status/884851123529691137 https://twitter.com/GTP_updates/status/884851123529691137
  - rhema 9y ago
    Calling it a "gift" has specific funding implications for professors with labs. When a professor is awarded a grant (e.g. from NSF), universities often skim a portion as high as 50% in overhead fees. However, "gifts" have no such overhead and the money can go much farther.
  - pc2g4d 9y ago
    Feels a lot like pharmaceutical companies' corruption of doctors.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
A company using the skyhigh profits it makes from it's market dominance to fund academic research arguing that it doesn't abuse it's market dominance? Perfect. If you're looking for arguments for antitrust in this area beyond consumer welfare you've found them. The concentrated wealth produced by big monopolistic firms has a gravity field of it's own, distorting public information and opinion.
mankash666 9y ago
Ridiculous! This is how ALL academic funding works. The headline might as well read NSF/NIH is paying professors for propagating "views". Given that Murdoch owns WSJ, fundamental science like evolution and global warming morph into "views", not facts/axioms.
- jgalt212 9y ago
  You're ignore that NSF/NIH funded research is plainly visible as the source of the funding upon publication of the research.
nl 9y ago
Several papers argued that Google’s search engine should be allowed to link to books and other intellectual property that authors and publishers say should be paid for—a group that includes News Corp, which owns the Journal. News Corp formally complained to European regulators about Google’s handling of news articles in search results. Yeah. And all those graphs showing how big Google is have nothing to do with the story. News Corp wants an anti-trust investigation into Google in the US too.
ucaetano 9y ago
Wait, a profit-driven company is spending money supporting research into areas related to the company's interests? Why is this even news? Is there a single for-profit company that funds research contrary to the company's interests?
- jgalt212 9y ago
  It's new because the source of the funds was often not disclosed. Other than that, and it's a big that, there is not much there. And by not much, if you consider the stakes low for sustaining a monopoly as long as possible.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    You mean the researchers often did not disclose the funding? Again, why is this even news? Apparently, tomorrow the WSJ will be reporting that Google lobbies.
    - jgalt212 9y ago
      So you're saying the source of funding for publicly published research is not relevant? If so, that's not a reasonable/common position to take.
      - ucaetano 9y ago
        Not at all, I'm saying that as that's pretty much the standard across the entire industry, it is weird why this is even news. A more appropriate headline would be "Shocking news: Google is a for-profit business, and it acts like one!". Move along folks, nothing to see here. I guess yesterday was a slow news day before all the Trump Jr. stuff came out.
        jgalt212 9y ago
        way to not concede a point
    - 9y ago
amoorthy 9y ago
Hi folks - below is an article I read recently which opened my eyes to the risks of corporate funded research. Companies have long funded research to back their interests that can have serious ramifications on public safety and use of public resources. Long read but enjoyable and informative. [1]: The Most Important Scientist You've Never Heard Of: http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scienti...
- ucaetano 9y ago
  Well, that is the alternative? Forbidding privately-funded research? Submitting it to gigantic bureaucratic committees? The only proposal I back is forcing publicly-funded researchers to disclose all gifts and grants, similarly to public officials, but even that is a massive bureaucratic ordeal. Research is not a regulated environment, and it should not be one.
  - amoorthy 9y ago
    I think the suggestion is simple: Disclose funding sources and % of funding total for any research. And if you don't disclose then no journal should accept your paper. Funding source does not by itself invalidate findings and corporations absolutely should continue to fund research. But for readers of research this is critical information. I may be naive but this does not seem like a big bureaucratic ask. And even if it were seems like good scientists would do it because they pride themselves on pursuing the truth with impeccable attention to detail.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      That is a fair suggestion, but the devil is in the details: how do you implement that? How do you prevent journals from accepting? How do you force researchers to disclose?
      - amoorthy 9y ago
        Journals that accept papers that don't disclose funding sources progressively lose their credibility. (I am not a scientist and have never published a paper so I may be asking for things here that are unreasonable but they seem plausible and useful to me).
mlinksva 9y ago
This must be Google's response https://www.blog.google/topics/public-policy/responding-campaign-accountability-report-academic-research/ https://www.blog.google/topics/public-policy/responding-camp...
- euyyn 9y ago
  Oh, wow.
Gustomaximus 9y ago
History repeats. This was a tactic by Microsoft in the old MS vs. Mac days. They gave 'no strings' funding to top tier uni professors with the tacit expectation everything was to be PC based and to support MS in general.
sjg007 9y ago
This is nothing new. Happens with sugar lobby, happened with big tobacco and happens on climate change etc... These are questions whose context depends on how you frame the debate. Those who frame it get to decide the playground. Helps too if you have the regulators in the same framework as well. By framing one can argue that google is a monopoly vs it's a small player in global advertising etc... Vs Facebook etc.. same thing with net neutrality. I think the Europeans are probably further ahead of the us on asking the right questions. We seem to have fallen backwards where foreign power influence on our elections is reframed away.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- flyovercow 9y ago
  dont be evil. i remember that. i remember when the internet was a promise....a promise to level the playing field. to give ordinary people something they never had. access. a new space. a new frontier. where we would build a better world, better than the one we came from. without worries about corrupt power hierarchies, without endless greed, without pointless cruelty. we were there to make something. to build. to create. to make this new world beautiful, a better version of ourselves. how far we have fallen. how much we have forgotten, forgotten where we came from or why we trekked here. they reached us after all, never more than a deal away, their sickness contagious, we all caught it, we are all guilty of it now. no more new world. just new greed. new corruption. new power hierarchies. internet is dead. long live internet.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TrickyRick 9y ago
Paywall...
sapote 9y ago
I know that the story is nonsense -- I am part of a research group that's gotten such grants before. This is basically a story aiming to confuse those who don't understand how research works. Google is funding work that aligns with what they do, but the grants they give are no-strings-attached and are tiny. (Government grants are much bigger.) Sure, Google only funds things that are related to what they care about, but of course that's the case. And these days the NSF is partnering with Intel, VMware, and others to give out grants on things that align with those companies. The WSJ has been sniffing around for this for a long time, and actually was trying to get professors' private email claiming that their email should be in the public domain. (I don't know if they succeeded.) I actually see this as part of the larger trend of trying to discredit research. Edited to add: the story focuses on policy and law research, which is easier to attack, and I don't have any interest in defending that. But I'm willing to bet that the amount of grant money Google gives out for that work is probably tiny compared to funding they give for CS research. And it's the latter I'm familiar with.
- blub 9y ago
  Who funds a research should be written in bold on the first page together with their interest in the topic and any potential conflicts of interest. The fact that the contributions were not disclosed is highly suspicious. Google is also not merely funding works that aligns with what they do, it's apparently "helped finance hundreds of research papers to DEFEND against regulatory challenges of its market dominance", which puts this in a completely different perspective. Care to comment on that? I found another quote which is frankly mind-boggling (http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/11/paying-professors-inside-googles-academic-2.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/11/paying-profes...): """In some years, Google officials in Washington compiled wish lists of academic papers that included working titles, abstracts and budgets for each proposed paper -- then they searched for willing authors, according to a former employee and a former Google lobbyist. Google promotes the research papers to government officials, and sometimes pays travel expenses for professors to meet with congressional aides and administration officials, according to the former lobbyist. The research has been used, for instance, to deflect antitrust accusations against Google by the Federal Trade Commission in 2012, according to a letter Google attorneys sent to the FTC chairman and viewed by the Journal.""" WTF? They're basically lobbying and paying professors to deflect antitrust accusations and there are people here DEFENDING them?!
gcb0 9y ago
mentioned that a few days ago in another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14700610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14700610

161 points by NN88 9y ago

NN88 9y ago

Full Text: http://archive.is/8pkAH http://archive.is/8pkAH

Sadly, this has been a known fact for a long time, and it never gets a lot of attention. Joshua Wright, the former FTC Commissioner, was one of the professors previously paid to write 'academic studies' for Google.

surveilmebro 9y ago

To be fair, similar tactics are standard practice in many non-tech fields: pharmaceuticals, law, and agronomy to name a few. What's perhaps different here is that researchers may not be accustomed to disclosing financial support that is only weakly connected to the research in question.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Sure. Nobody's saying that Google's invented a new strategy here. We've all known Phillip Morris, Monsanto, and the like to do this, but generally such companies have been derided for the behavior. People are generally hesitant to group Google in the same class of corporate actor.
- bykovich2 9y ago
  The notion that a given multinational billion-dollar syndicate is not going to engage in the behavior characteristic of multinational billion-dollar syndicates because it's run by nerds instead of suits seems, at the very least, suspect.
  - lovemenot 9y ago
    So let's go ahead and proselytise this cynicism until the general population is as distrustful of their new corporate champions as they are of their now-reviled older champions.
blub 9y ago
It's difficult to understand the purpose of your comment except as a Google apology, which I'm sure they can do fine without, seeing that they're a huge corporation paying a lot of money to have the friendly ear of government representatives. Yes, there's a lot of things going wrong in the world. Today we discuss Google, tomorrow Microsoft, etc. There's enough for everybody.

gnicholas 9y ago

> The money didn’t influence his work, Mr. Heald said, and Google issued no conditions: “They said, ‘If you take this $20,000 and open up a doughnut shop with it—we’ll never give you any more money—but that’s fine.’” At a glance, this seems like the funds are no-strings-attached. But when you think for a minute, you realize it's the exact opposite. Google is saying that if they don't like what you do with the money, they won't give you any more — but if they do like what you do with it then you might get more. This incentivizes the professor to use the money to do things that Google would like, which is the opposite of no-strings-attached. There technically are no strings attached to this money, but the possibility of future payments (which ranged from $5k to $400k) is a pretty big enticement.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
This is one of my favorites: > He said Google was careful to say the checks came with no requirements: “It was a gift. Recipients can do what they want.” I have never heard a statement so akin to organized crime as this. Things like saying how it'd 'be unfortunate if something happened to someone' or how they 'gave him a suggestion'. The fact that they are being so careful to avoid explicitly stating they paid professors for supporting work makes me wonder... is there actually a crime here they're committing? I didn't think there really was, but if there wasn't, I doubt Google would be so coy. Google Transparency Project tweeted that Eric Schmidt used one such paper when testifying to Congress without disclosing their financial interest: https://twitter.com/GTP_updates/status/884851123529691137 https://twitter.com/GTP_updates/status/884851123529691137
- rhema 9y ago
  Calling it a "gift" has specific funding implications for professors with labs. When a professor is awarded a grant (e.g. from NSF), universities often skim a portion as high as 50% in overhead fees. However, "gifts" have no such overhead and the money can go much farther.
- pc2g4d 9y ago
  Feels a lot like pharmaceutical companies' corruption of doctors.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

A company using the skyhigh profits it makes from it's market dominance to fund academic research arguing that it doesn't abuse it's market dominance? Perfect. If you're looking for arguments for antitrust in this area beyond consumer welfare you've found them. The concentrated wealth produced by big monopolistic firms has a gravity field of it's own, distorting public information and opinion.

mankash666 9y ago

Ridiculous! This is how ALL academic funding works. The headline might as well read NSF/NIH is paying professors for propagating "views". Given that Murdoch owns WSJ, fundamental science like evolution and global warming morph into "views", not facts/axioms.

jgalt212 9y ago
You're ignore that NSF/NIH funded research is plainly visible as the source of the funding upon publication of the research.

nl 9y ago

Several papers argued that Google’s search engine should be allowed to link to books and other intellectual property that authors and publishers say should be paid for—a group that includes News Corp, which owns the Journal. News Corp formally complained to European regulators about Google’s handling of news articles in search results. Yeah. And all those graphs showing how big Google is have nothing to do with the story. News Corp wants an anti-trust investigation into Google in the US too.

ucaetano 9y ago

Wait, a profit-driven company is spending money supporting research into areas related to the company's interests? Why is this even news? Is there a single for-profit company that funds research contrary to the company's interests?

jgalt212 9y ago
It's new because the source of the funds was often not disclosed. Other than that, and it's a big that, there is not much there. And by not much, if you consider the stakes low for sustaining a monopoly as long as possible.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  You mean the researchers often did not disclose the funding? Again, why is this even news? Apparently, tomorrow the WSJ will be reporting that Google lobbies.
  - jgalt212 9y ago
    So you're saying the source of funding for publicly published research is not relevant? If so, that's not a reasonable/common position to take.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      Not at all, I'm saying that as that's pretty much the standard across the entire industry, it is weird why this is even news. A more appropriate headline would be "Shocking news: Google is a for-profit business, and it acts like one!". Move along folks, nothing to see here. I guess yesterday was a slow news day before all the Trump Jr. stuff came out.
      - jgalt212 9y ago
        way to not concede a point
  - 9y ago

amoorthy 9y ago

Hi folks - below is an article I read recently which opened my eyes to the risks of corporate funded research. Companies have long funded research to back their interests that can have serious ramifications on public safety and use of public resources. Long read but enjoyable and informative. [1]: The Most Important Scientist You've Never Heard Of: http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scienti...

ucaetano 9y ago
Well, that is the alternative? Forbidding privately-funded research? Submitting it to gigantic bureaucratic committees? The only proposal I back is forcing publicly-funded researchers to disclose all gifts and grants, similarly to public officials, but even that is a massive bureaucratic ordeal. Research is not a regulated environment, and it should not be one.
- amoorthy 9y ago
  I think the suggestion is simple: Disclose funding sources and % of funding total for any research. And if you don't disclose then no journal should accept your paper. Funding source does not by itself invalidate findings and corporations absolutely should continue to fund research. But for readers of research this is critical information. I may be naive but this does not seem like a big bureaucratic ask. And even if it were seems like good scientists would do it because they pride themselves on pursuing the truth with impeccable attention to detail.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    That is a fair suggestion, but the devil is in the details: how do you implement that? How do you prevent journals from accepting? How do you force researchers to disclose?
    - amoorthy 9y ago
      Journals that accept papers that don't disclose funding sources progressively lose their credibility. (I am not a scientist and have never published a paper so I may be asking for things here that are unreasonable but they seem plausible and useful to me).

mlinksva 9y ago

This must be Google's response https://www.blog.google/topics/public-policy/responding-campaign-accountability-report-academic-research/ https://www.blog.google/topics/public-policy/responding-camp...

euyyn 9y ago
Oh, wow.

Gustomaximus 9y ago

History repeats. This was a tactic by Microsoft in the old MS vs. Mac days. They gave 'no strings' funding to top tier uni professors with the tacit expectation everything was to be PC based and to support MS in general.

sjg007 9y ago

This is nothing new. Happens with sugar lobby, happened with big tobacco and happens on climate change etc... These are questions whose context depends on how you frame the debate. Those who frame it get to decide the playground. Helps too if you have the regulators in the same framework as well. By framing one can argue that google is a monopoly vs it's a small player in global advertising etc... Vs Facebook etc.. same thing with net neutrality. I think the Europeans are probably further ahead of the us on asking the right questions. We seem to have fallen backwards where foreign power influence on our elections is reframed away.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
flyovercow 9y ago
dont be evil. i remember that. i remember when the internet was a promise....a promise to level the playing field. to give ordinary people something they never had. access. a new space. a new frontier. where we would build a better world, better than the one we came from. without worries about corrupt power hierarchies, without endless greed, without pointless cruelty. we were there to make something. to build. to create. to make this new world beautiful, a better version of ourselves. how far we have fallen. how much we have forgotten, forgotten where we came from or why we trekked here. they reached us after all, never more than a deal away, their sickness contagious, we all caught it, we are all guilty of it now. no more new world. just new greed. new corruption. new power hierarchies. internet is dead. long live internet.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TrickyRick 9y ago

Paywall...

sapote 9y ago

I know that the story is nonsense -- I am part of a research group that's gotten such grants before. This is basically a story aiming to confuse those who don't understand how research works. Google is funding work that aligns with what they do, but the grants they give are no-strings-attached and are tiny. (Government grants are much bigger.) Sure, Google only funds things that are related to what they care about, but of course that's the case. And these days the NSF is partnering with Intel, VMware, and others to give out grants on things that align with those companies. The WSJ has been sniffing around for this for a long time, and actually was trying to get professors' private email claiming that their email should be in the public domain. (I don't know if they succeeded.) I actually see this as part of the larger trend of trying to discredit research. Edited to add: the story focuses on policy and law research, which is easier to attack, and I don't have any interest in defending that. But I'm willing to bet that the amount of grant money Google gives out for that work is probably tiny compared to funding they give for CS research. And it's the latter I'm familiar with.

blub 9y ago
Who funds a research should be written in bold on the first page together with their interest in the topic and any potential conflicts of interest. The fact that the contributions were not disclosed is highly suspicious. Google is also not merely funding works that aligns with what they do, it's apparently "helped finance hundreds of research papers to DEFEND against regulatory challenges of its market dominance", which puts this in a completely different perspective. Care to comment on that? I found another quote which is frankly mind-boggling (http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/11/paying-professors-inside-googles-academic-2.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/11/paying-profes...): """In some years, Google officials in Washington compiled wish lists of academic papers that included working titles, abstracts and budgets for each proposed paper -- then they searched for willing authors, according to a former employee and a former Google lobbyist. Google promotes the research papers to government officials, and sometimes pays travel expenses for professors to meet with congressional aides and administration officials, according to the former lobbyist. The research has been used, for instance, to deflect antitrust accusations against Google by the Federal Trade Commission in 2012, according to a letter Google attorneys sent to the FTC chairman and viewed by the Journal.""" WTF? They're basically lobbying and paying professors to deflect antitrust accusations and there are people here DEFENDING them?!

gcb0 9y ago

mentioned that a few days ago in another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14700610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14700610