3 ms·
One paragraph struck me as a pretty wild claim in an article about fake news: > Last year, for example, the British music industry association UK Music calcula
by moby_click 7y ago
One paragraph struck me as a pretty wild claim in an article about fake news:
> Last year, for example, the British music industry association UK Music calculated that Google had spent almost €31 million to lobby against a stricter copyright law.
Here is what I found:
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2018/12/copyright-directive-how-competing-big-business-lobbies-drowned-out-critical-voices https://corporateeurope.org/en/2018/12/copyright-directive-h...
> UK Music simply took the entire lobby budget declared by Google in 2017, €6 million, and added to that the budgets of all the organisations and think tanks it is a member of, declaring that the “The combined value of Google’s indirect lobbying of the EU amounts to €25.5m”.
- human20190310 7y agoI can't tell if that's honest or dishonest accounting.
- moby_click 7y agoI don't know if there is a definition of honest accounting that I should be aware of. I assume the numbers are reasonably correct, but ascribing 31m to google's lobbying effort against the copyright directive is more than dishonest. It is incorrectly quoting UK Music, which did the dishonest accounting. For example, 1.75m from Konrad Adenauer-Stiftung, which is a think tank closely related to the party of the rapporteur responsible for the copyright directive. If they were engaged in lobbying related to the copyright directive, they most certainly would not align with google's interests. If you take a look at the transparency register (http://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultation/displaylobbyist.do?id=510151427278-94 http://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultation...), you'll find that almost their entire budget for the declared activities comes from two german federal agencies.