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Notice that no Googlers have a good response to this or the Eric Schmidt / Hillary Clinton connection. Google’s ties to the Obama administration were deep.

lefstathiou 7y ago
Googles entire restructuring into Alphabet was a response to this imo. They knew this could happen and have already organized the business into discrete operating and reporting lines. The battle will be over how much they fracture the big 4 Google services themselves (Maps, Search, Email and YouTube).
- some1else 7y ago
  Analytics & Ads
badrabbit 7y ago
This. Obama administration had a lot more googlers than Trump administration has Fox news icons. I still don't why exactly they have ties so deep specifically with Google.
481092 7y ago
Is that wrong? Maybe we should do something about Fox and Breitbart's link to the current administration then.
- 481092 7y ago
  So much for intellectual honesty on this site. New user and I thought this was something praised here. The hypocrisy of upvoting the parent because they're against information propagators being linked to an administration while ignoring the elephant in the room.
  - dang 7y ago
    I'm not sure what your complaint is about here, but it breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not posting comments like this? If you're concerned about something not being right on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.
dmix 7y ago
It really shouldn't matter what a public officials prior employment, often domain expertise is often a good or necessary thing. But it unfortunately seems to be a recurring problem worth investigating. There should be some conflict of interest rules around anything related to your former employers. Only if they were previously high up at the company, of course. The DoJ and other state legal offices have rules about excusing prosecutors from cases but this one seems to not be seen as an issue at these regulatory and broader judicial agencies. This should matter considering the US is disparaging China for having private companies backed by the powerful government bodies, operating under a different set of rules than everyone else.
panarky 7y ago
Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation". Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more. Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?
- mtgx 7y ago
  > It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more. And that's not what the charges are about either. You're making it way too simplistic. Google has been involved in actual anti-competitive actions, for which they've already been found guilty in Europe that had nothing to do with "users liking their service more" - Google actually downranked competition in the search engine, and other stuff like that. There even was a story a while ago on HN about ProtonMail being essentially shadowbanned from Google search for the term "encrypted email" for a year before they made a big scandal about it and Google "admitted its error" (the same bullshit excuse Facebook uses every time it's caught tracking users in a new and more nefarious way). Also, I can't be bothered to look for a link now, but there is a good story out there about how Google killed a map competitor in the US around that time, too (Skyhook was it?). Once again - nothing to do with "users liking Google's maps more" -- Google took real action to prevent a competitor from existing in the market place. It's also a super-duper coincidence that Eric Schmidt started working for the Pentagon, while also remaining on Google's board and some kind of technical executive, too, not long before Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven. Either people don't want to admit what's happening or they are being way too naive when they see all of this and think it's "nothing but a coincidence". It was well known that Schmidt was one of Obama's besties at the time. And Google is ranking very high in its lobbying efforts, too.
  - panarky 7y ago
    > Eric Schmidt started working for the Pentagon I may not like it, but it's not an anti-trust concern. > Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven Google shut this down under pressure from employees. Also, not an anti-trust concern. > Schmidt was one of Obama's besties Executives at right-wing media are besties with the current president, but that shouldn't result in a future administration launching anti-trust actions against their firms. > encrypted mail, Skyhook, etc. Sounds pretty tenuous, but if there's something here roughly equivalent severity to other anti-trust issues then sure, investigate that. But it looks to me like a piddling pretext to punish perceived political differences in media and infotech.
tozeur 7y ago
I wish it was common knowledge that large and influential companies and the government have VERY strong ties. It’s how the entire upper echelon of the world works, for better or for worse.
afpx 7y ago
As were the Obama administration’s early ties to many technology companies. Obama explicitly attempted to bring on “technocrats” into his cabinet as a way to try to modernism the effectiveness of government and leverage the internet. In contrast to many other administrations who lag behind technology, at least Obama was attempting to keep pace with it. I don’t view this as a bad thing.
DannyBee 7y ago
You never asked for one? Here's one: This dataset includes people like my intern, who left to go join USDS after his internship was up, etc So there is some amount of flat out silliness here. It also covers 14 years (2002->2016), and has a fairly small number of people for that number of years. A significant number are DC people, and, surprisingly, if you want to stay in DC, you are going to work at the government most likely. During the earlier parts of this timeframe, there was no one other than Google who was local (google opened the office in 2006). During the middle part, 2006-2013, other tech companies were just staffing up policy orgs. Over the entire time period, the government is by far the biggest employer in the region. There were not a lot of even tech companies (let alone local policy orgs for tech companies) in most of that time period, the biggest other one would have been weird things like "livingsocial". Having been recruiting in DC during the 2006-2012 timeframe , out of the 1000+ resumes i'd reviewed, i'd say 80+% were working at the government. Like, why is this a conspiracy instead of normal attrition? In particular: where was it you expected them to go that was more acceptable? I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of non-governmental jobs they would have been able go to if they wanted to stay local. It's a little more true now, but even then you'd just see them bounce between tech company policy departments. Over the same time period, i'm 100% sure as many policy/legal/etc people in MTV/etc went to go work at Facebook, startups, etc (IE whatever the local industry was). I'm also sure you'd find the same relative number of facebookers/etc in DC (which again, was very small during that time period) left for the administration, etc.

lefstathiou 7y ago

Googles entire restructuring into Alphabet was a response to this imo. They knew this could happen and have already organized the business into discrete operating and reporting lines. The battle will be over how much they fracture the big 4 Google services themselves (Maps, Search, Email and YouTube).

some1else 7y ago
Analytics & Ads

badrabbit 7y ago

This. Obama administration had a lot more googlers than Trump administration has Fox news icons. I still don't why exactly they have ties so deep specifically with Google.

481092 7y ago

Is that wrong? Maybe we should do something about Fox and Breitbart's link to the current administration then.

481092 7y ago
So much for intellectual honesty on this site. New user and I thought this was something praised here. The hypocrisy of upvoting the parent because they're against information propagators being linked to an administration while ignoring the elephant in the room.
- dang 7y ago
  I'm not sure what your complaint is about here, but it breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not posting comments like this? If you're concerned about something not being right on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.

dmix 7y ago

It really shouldn't matter what a public officials prior employment, often domain expertise is often a good or necessary thing. But it unfortunately seems to be a recurring problem worth investigating. There should be some conflict of interest rules around anything related to your former employers. Only if they were previously high up at the company, of course. The DoJ and other state legal offices have rules about excusing prosecutors from cases but this one seems to not be seen as an issue at these regulatory and broader judicial agencies. This should matter considering the US is disparaging China for having private companies backed by the powerful government bodies, operating under a different set of rules than everyone else.

panarky 7y ago

Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation". Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more. Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?

mtgx 7y ago
> It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more. And that's not what the charges are about either. You're making it way too simplistic. Google has been involved in actual anti-competitive actions, for which they've already been found guilty in Europe that had nothing to do with "users liking their service more" - Google actually downranked competition in the search engine, and other stuff like that. There even was a story a while ago on HN about ProtonMail being essentially shadowbanned from Google search for the term "encrypted email" for a year before they made a big scandal about it and Google "admitted its error" (the same bullshit excuse Facebook uses every time it's caught tracking users in a new and more nefarious way). Also, I can't be bothered to look for a link now, but there is a good story out there about how Google killed a map competitor in the US around that time, too (Skyhook was it?). Once again - nothing to do with "users liking Google's maps more" -- Google took real action to prevent a competitor from existing in the market place. It's also a super-duper coincidence that Eric Schmidt started working for the Pentagon, while also remaining on Google's board and some kind of technical executive, too, not long before Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven. Either people don't want to admit what's happening or they are being way too naive when they see all of this and think it's "nothing but a coincidence". It was well known that Schmidt was one of Obama's besties at the time. And Google is ranking very high in its lobbying efforts, too.
- panarky 7y ago
  > Eric Schmidt started working for the Pentagon I may not like it, but it's not an anti-trust concern. > Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven Google shut this down under pressure from employees. Also, not an anti-trust concern. > Schmidt was one of Obama's besties Executives at right-wing media are besties with the current president, but that shouldn't result in a future administration launching anti-trust actions against their firms. > encrypted mail, Skyhook, etc. Sounds pretty tenuous, but if there's something here roughly equivalent severity to other anti-trust issues then sure, investigate that. But it looks to me like a piddling pretext to punish perceived political differences in media and infotech.

tozeur 7y ago

I wish it was common knowledge that large and influential companies and the government have VERY strong ties. It’s how the entire upper echelon of the world works, for better or for worse.

afpx 7y ago

As were the Obama administration’s early ties to many technology companies. Obama explicitly attempted to bring on “technocrats” into his cabinet as a way to try to modernism the effectiveness of government and leverage the internet. In contrast to many other administrations who lag behind technology, at least Obama was attempting to keep pace with it. I don’t view this as a bad thing.

DannyBee 7y ago

You never asked for one? Here's one: This dataset includes people like my intern, who left to go join USDS after his internship was up, etc So there is some amount of flat out silliness here. It also covers 14 years (2002->2016), and has a fairly small number of people for that number of years. A significant number are DC people, and, surprisingly, if you want to stay in DC, you are going to work at the government most likely. During the earlier parts of this timeframe, there was no one other than Google who was local (google opened the office in 2006). During the middle part, 2006-2013, other tech companies were just staffing up policy orgs. Over the entire time period, the government is by far the biggest employer in the region. There were not a lot of even tech companies (let alone local policy orgs for tech companies) in most of that time period, the biggest other one would have been weird things like "livingsocial". Having been recruiting in DC during the 2006-2012 timeframe , out of the 1000+ resumes i'd reviewed, i'd say 80+% were working at the government. Like, why is this a conspiracy instead of normal attrition? In particular: where was it you expected them to go that was more acceptable? I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of non-governmental jobs they would have been able go to if they wanted to stay local. It's a little more true now, but even then you'd just see them bounce between tech company policy departments. Over the same time period, i'm 100% sure as many policy/legal/etc people in MTV/etc went to go work at Facebook, startups, etc (IE whatever the local industry was). I'm also sure you'd find the same relative number of facebookers/etc in DC (which again, was very small during that time period) left for the administration, etc.