As a sibling points out, News Corp is notorious for Google hit pieces. I would take anything they say with a grain of salt. This piece makes some bold claims,

As a sibling points out, News Corp is notorious for Google hit pieces. I would take anything they say with a grain of salt. This piece makes some bold claims, like > Google has paid professors whose papers, for instance, declared that the collection of consumer data was a fair exchange for its free services But the only specific paper they reference is [1], a copyright paper with doesn't seem very relevant to Google's core business. If their claim had any merit, why couldn't they produce a more relevant example? They claim that Google "pays professors", when in reality Google is giving out research grants. Professors are getting "paid" only in a very indirect sense, since the funding goes to their departments. As their example paper says, > The authors would also like to thank Google for a grant that enabled us to hire research assistants, to compensate human subjects, and to travel to present our findings. And this isn't some secretive operation, despite the WSJ's attempts to frame it that way. You can see a list of these grants in [2], along with more background about the grant program. The referenced paper is listed there under Policy. Edit: Also wanted to call out this amazing bit of spin: > Mr. Sokol, though, had extensive financial ties to Google, according to his emails obtained by the Journal. He was a part-time attorney at the Silicon Valley law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which has Google as a client. Wikipedia says WSGR has ~1850 attorneys. In what world does this constitute "extensive financial ties"? [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130008&mod=article_inline https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130008&... [2] https://research.google/outreach/past-programs/faculty-research-awards/?category=2011 https://research.google/outreach/past-programs/faculty-resea...