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Part of the reason that Google is in this situation is because, instead of staying neutral politically they took sides making themselves more of a target. There

Part of the reason that Google is in this situation is because, instead of staying neutral politically they took sides making themselves more of a target. There is also the issue of data privacy as it relates to sharing the data with the US Government. If they start to share more data with the US Government, the risk losing users and ad revenue. On the other hand many argue that their refusal to share data is bad for society as a whole. For example, some argue that more sharing of data would have helped catch the Florida school shooter before it happened. No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings in most of their profits.

prepend 9y ago
This is the sad reality. Google is out of sync with political currents so now there is this PR campaign against them. Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides. Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on DC. For example, in 98 MS spent $4M. By 03, this was up to almost $9M. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000115&year=2017id=D000000115&year=2017 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...
AlwaysBCoding 9y ago
I heard Peter Thiel make an interesting comment on this recently: that banks avoid political scrutiny because they fund both political parties, whereas Google is overtly biased towards one side (the blue side). This makes the red side hate them, and the blue side neglect them because they think of them as easy money. The only way to survive political scrutiny in a two-party system is to support both sides, or at least have a plausible threat that you could support the other side if over-regulated.

prepend 9y ago

This is the sad reality. Google is out of sync with political currents so now there is this PR campaign against them. Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides. Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on DC. For example, in 98 MS spent $4M. By 03, this was up to almost $9M. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000115&year=2017id=D000000115&year=2017 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...

AlwaysBCoding 9y ago

I heard Peter Thiel make an interesting comment on this recently: that banks avoid political scrutiny because they fund both political parties, whereas Google is overtly biased towards one side (the blue side). This makes the red side hate them, and the blue side neglect them because they think of them as easy money. The only way to survive political scrutiny in a two-party system is to support both sides, or at least have a plausible threat that you could support the other side if over-regulated.