It's a weird situation for a number of reasons. Schmidt is clearly culpable, but it also seems to be the case that New America was existentially dependent on Google-derived funding.
Right, and when Google uses its clout in online ads to starve businesses that criticize Google, it'll be a clearer, less fraught story. Here, though, New America is dependent on charity from Google. Google doesn't donate to every think tank in Washington, just the ones it agrees with or has something to gain from.
If Google admitted it was their propaganda arm then he would have no right to complain. But since they never did, it behooves Google to fund their outcomes regardless of whether their research benefits/harms Google.
Why should Google expect funding a non-profit would benefit them? They get the tax-write-off precisely because it benefits The People first and Google second, if at all.
No, you are confusing charity with non-profit. Not every non-profit is a charity. Example: the NFL, a non-profit that serves its taxpaying members. A non-profit is an organization that exist not to generate revenue for its owners, so the owners don't pay tax -- the members or beneficaries do, under regular tax laws. Google pays taxes on its profits generated via the activity of the nonprofit.
Hypothetically, letting some anti-Google rhetoric through might legitimize an otherwise supportive stance.
Say I'm 80% evil and I fund a think tank. The think tank's reputation was 100, and now it's 60 with regard to statements about me because my funding it makes it seem biased. If it published a story that says I'm actually 4% evil, then it gets a reputation boost, I'm not looking as bad as I actually am, and I'm well positioned to let the organization do positive spin when I really need it.
I would say that Google and similar orgs actually usually do this. But Google and Amazon are getting really, really nervous when people talk about monopoly. If anti-trust comes back into vogue, and it could possibly, then it's an existential threat for these empires. They have to carefully manage their carrots and sticks on this issue, and with this one they went with the stick.
Because any short-term harm that might have come from an undesirable policy paper is outweighed by the long-term, and lasting, harm to Google's reputation that is occurring now.
I disagree. Regulators might read the output of a think tank. People like you and me are instead talking about their actions. Seems like a clear win for Google.
This was my reaction - It is my understanding that "think tanks" are essentially a nice name for lobbying organizations. A google funded lobbyist being fired for criticizing the company he is paid to lobby for doesn't seem out of the ordinary. Not that i think it's good, but it sounds like a perfectly normal event given the current state of western politics.
Or am i mistaken and think tanks are usually politically neutral pure-research organizations?
Think tanks are rarely neutral; they're generally organized around a set of ideological principles. New America isn't really a pro-Google lobbying organization, except in the sense that by shackling themselves financially to Google, they've rendered themselves incapable of criticizing Google even when Google contravenes their principles.
As a lobbying strategy it would be a little like Google trying to take financial control over Cato or Heritage, not to get those think tanks to spew pro-Google stuff, but to ensure that the primary conservative and libertarian voices in Washington were unable to criticize Google.
(Cato's relationship with the Koch brothers gets similar criticism).
It's definitely fraught! But New America isn't a victim here.
Even if they are politically neutral why would the think tank expect to be funded by the target of their criticism? If they are truly neutral why would they not seek out diverse funding sources?
The idea is that sources are interested in funding BECAUSE they might be criticized. That's when they actually get something out of it. Not a lot of actual altruists in the world, and if they exist, they're funding NGOs that deal with clean water or hunger or something less abstract, at least in the aggregate.
"Think tanks" are influence laundering operations.
If someone or some corporation wants something (anything) done, it is more persuasive when the proposed ideas come from an ostensibly neutral organization rather than a transparently self-interested one.
This works well or it wouldn't be done this way. This is also why influence laundering organizations will fight tooth and nail to defend the appearance of funding-independence while knowing quite well that it's a lie: the appearance of neutrality is the product they are selling to patrons, and if they can't sell product they will go out of business.
I'm curious, how do you propose they pay their costs? If you are unwilling to look at ads why is it unreasonable for them to ask you to pay a subscription?
Just to play devil's advocate, I wonder if it would be possible to sustain WaPo from Amazon's revenue stream, and what impacts that could have on ostensible and de facto journalistic integrity.
Not really addressing the heart of your question but WaPo is owned by Bezos and his holding company not Amazon. So they would not really have a great reason to siphon off Amazon's revenue stream.
2) That would create a clear conflict of interest. This post is an example of what can happen when you have only one source of funding which you may need to criticize.
Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and WaPo. The original comment went to sustaining WaPo on Amazon's revenue, not ownership. The conflict of interest already exists. Don't expect anything substantially critical of Bezos or Amazon from WaPo.
Amazon is not owned entirely by Bezos so he would have to justify using Amazon revenue to support WaPo to the rest of Amazon ownership. If Amazon owned WaPo that would be an easier thing to do in the same way Amazon may subsidize IMDb, Zappos or Whole Foods. In this case the distinction between the two matters. Just because the same person is in a similar position at both companies does not mean money can easily flow beteeen them. This is the same reason the WaPo is not a tax shelter for Amazon.
That's not a very good answer. Do you think one newspaper should allow you to read their work because you subscribe to another? If you don't want to subscribe just turn off the adblocker. They're giving you the choice.
Washington post gives you a long trial period if you are an Amazon prime customer. The subscription is cheaper if you are a student. Support good journalists, they are people too. Either give them ad revenue or get a subscription. If you don't work for free, don't expect others to.
The issue here is that when you disable Adblock, they still won't allow you to view content unless you purchase a subscription... They claim that you can disable Adblock || purchase a subscription but in reality it is &&.
> Big businesses can threaten free speech when they accumulate too much power. For Google, that moment has come.
This feels like a bit of an exaggeration in this situation, no? I mean, some states have at-will employment where they can just fire you for any reason they want. And if you're doing things that are actively working against them, of course they're going to want to part ways with you. And even in states without that, I'm sure there's some clause in their contract that says "if you speak out against us we have the option of terminating you." That's not really a free speech issue at that point, right? Their free speech isn't being hindered or taken away at all. Rather, a business is making business decisions based on your speech, which happen to effect you.
EDIT: to clarify, I'm all for the world getting more ethical. I was just kind of arguing a semantic: free speech is mostly known for being a civil liberty, and Google technically isn't restricting that in this case.
Don't be reductionist, he doesn't work for google, he worked for a nonprofit to which Google donated. Google threw its weight around to get him fired by threatening to pull funding.
"Working for" implies paid employment. He never worked for Google. The think tank is supposed to be independent from its donors. If, in practice, it's not as independent as it's supposed to be, all the more reason to admire him for following the spirit of what the organization was supposed to do. In no way was he legally or morally beholden to Google, despite the fact that it was ultimately revealed that they were in a position to get him fired. If I hold a gun to your head, you don't owe me anything--though you might still do what I say.
Zoom! Let me explain that joke, and the truth behind it. Murderers and would-be murderers are more likely to:
- derive enjoyment of begging victims than indifferent ones
- respect someone whom is willing to pay the price
Furthermore, in way, this is what Christians and nonviolent leaders like Gandi originally meant about "turn the other cheek"... not being meek and defenseless but to volunteer for punishment. The bully or abuser is confused and/or gives respect for such, and then is more likely to stop doing it. It's not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing. Only a good guy with a gun or having massive balls and a plan, can stop a bad guy with a gun. ;)
Incorrect. He was not a Google employee. Google was a patron of the nonprofit think-tank, NA, and he worked for NA. The patron didn't like what think-tank was saying and used leverage to corrupt think-tank because it's leader lacked integrity and moral courage. NA's leadership could've chosen to say "FU and here's your money back" to Google, but they didn't. NA sided with Google, but he still isn't, and never was, a Google employee. It's fucked up and every NA patron should pull their funding if they had any integrity.
You work for whoever pays you. In this case Google/Schmidt paid NA, who paid the author. In an ideal world, then yes a think tank would be independent of their funding source. In the real world, they aren't and never have been. Ignoring this just gets you fired.
By all means shame NA for this, but thinking that it's a scandal that the non-profit world works for corporate donors is naiive.
Yes, of course they do. Why the hell else would alphabet donate to them?
It's literally the best investment they could make[1]:
"Between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. A year-long analysis by the Sunlight Foundation suggests, however, that what they gave pales compared to what those same corporations got: $4.4 trillion in federal business and support"
So while they do receive funding from Google, if Google is permitted to control the discourse in this way we should ask if New America deserves non-profit status and whether Google should be able to deduct monies spent on the entity.
And what about other people that give to non-profits? Should they also be made to continue giving even if they no longer agree with what the non-profit is doing?
No one can or should be able to force you to donate your money to any endeavor. That said it's fair to question whether an organization that is currently enjoying a tax free exemption on the basis of being a independent non profit should continue to enjoy that status after proving they are not in fact independent.
It's likewise fair to question whether any person donating to that organization deserves to write off their donations if the receiving organization acts more like a pr division of the giver.
My personal opinion is that if an organization receives more than 50% of it's funding from one source, it's no longer independent and shouldn't be treated as such
... no ... the essence of free speech is free association and dissociation with people, ideas, and narratives. There should be no compulsion or "made to continue giving" if they disagree.
In this aspect, google would be well within its rights to discontinue funding speech it no longer agreed with. Its within its rights to attempt to influence a narrative.
But there are optics associated with this, and people who may be (rightfully or wrongfully) suspicious of its motives, who would take such actions as confirmation of their own pet theories.
Without reflecting on how common a pattern this is, if this is what happened, then it happened. And its not wrong for google to ask for tighter conformity to its preferred narrative. Its not wrong for the think tank to offer this tighter conformity.
It just looks ... well ... bad.
Google acting in their own self interest is rational. Doesn't mean its "good" or "bad" in a wider context, but it is rational.
They wouldn't be made to continue. But if it's clear that the actions of a given non-profit are really for the financial benefit of their 'donors' then then they should be taxed like any other marketing division.
No, but of course that's not what happened. They said shut down the open markets division or we'll pull funding. And probably there was something like "oh yeah and when you're looking at what our lost patronage does to your bottom line, remember that I also play golf with 4-5 of your other patrons so think very carefully"
I was being absurd here on purpose, as I was responding to a statement that implied this is what should be done. And it seems to have been edited since. I guess I should have quoted it.
All non profits have a purpose and companies as well as individuals support the non profit expressly because they have a purpose. If a company or individual thinks that a non profit is acting against that purpose then they can communicate that to the group or stop funding it. This does not make the organization a "for profit" group. It is a disagreement over the purpose of the organization and how they work to achieve that purpose.
New America is a think tank and civic enterprise committed to renewing American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age. We generate big ideas, bridge the gap between technology and policy, and curate broad public conversation. Structurally, we combine the best of a policy research institute, technology laboratory, public forum, media platform, and a venture capital fund for ideas. We are a distinctive community of thinkers, writers, researchers, technologists, and community activists who believe deeply in the possibility of American renewal.
Very hard to argue against free speech with a mission statement focused on ideas, research, and "public conversation"
For fun, the Open Markets division in particular:
The Open Markets program at New America was founded to protect liberty and democracy in America from extreme concentrations of economic and political power. We do so by researching and reporting on the political and economic dangers posed by monopolization—in the United States and in the international system—and identifying ways to reestablish America’s political economy on a more fair, secure, and stable footing.
Google gave money to a non-profit with an anti-monopoly division and then got mad when the anti-monopoly division praised anti-monopoly legislation that just happened to hurt Google.
No, free speech means speech without consequences. And it doesn't exist in the extreme absolute version. The more consequences of speech, the less free it is.
The 1st amendment protects speech from government consequences, even though it isn't absolute. Consequences in the private market still reduce the freedom of speech even though they have nothing to do with the Constitution.
And if someone finds their freedom reduced, they can perfectly reasonably complain about it. And you can rationally talk about how the reduction was fair or that it wasn't. You can't rationally deny the reduction.
EDIT: I barely ever do this sort of edit, but c'mon. People downvoted this? It's like some people are opposed to plain truth. Nothing above is remotely questionable.
> I mean, some states have at-will employment where they can just fire you for any reason they want.
As someone pointed in previous similar topic, this reason can't be illegal, and potentially this threatens his constitutional free-speech rights in this case.
> I'm sure there's some clause in their contract that says "if you speak out against us we have the option of terminating you."
Again, if some contract provision is against constitution, it is not enforceable.
The free speech amendment stops congress from passing a law that abridges freedom of speech. A non-disparagement clause in a private contract doesn't violate the constitution.
There's the con. There is no independence from funding sources unless you have so many that you can ignore losing one. Now if one were to turn that critical lens to the rest of the advertising funded media...
The philosophy behind freedom of speech is (to greatly simplify) "it's so much better for the advancement of ideas when people can say controversial things without being afraid of material reprisals."
One way to promote the ideal is to not push legal penalties against those who say such things. That's the basis of the legal protection of speech, and specific countries' laws thereon (in the US, the First Amendment).
But you get the same disaster, and failure of the ideal, when non-governmental actors do it. If everyone fears going into poverty when they say something controversial, well, we're in the same crappy-ideas-that-no-one-criticizes dystopia.
Hence my frustration at those who give the lecture about "lol First Amendment is just for the government" and "lol why should they have to pay you when they don't like your ideas?" Yes, they're technically correct, but it's comically missing the point to "stand up for free speech" but also cheer on the technically-legal ways you can make someone suffer for disagreeing with you.
That doesn't mean we should force you to keep buying from those whose ideas you don't like. It does mean we shouldn't be sanguine about orgs using financial power over someone's livelihood to keep their (potentially) good ideas from being spoken.
Social censorship of speech is nearly as dangerous as government censorship of speech. We need to have a robust norm of not trying to silence people for dissenting viewpoints
So if my employee is advocating murdering me and my entire family that is cool? I have to fund someone who is actively trying to get political support to put me in a concentration camp?
>This is sort of ridiculous. You don't have to keep someone on your payroll who is actively speaking out about white supremacy.
I explicitly agreed with that. Did you see this part?
>>That doesn't mean we should force you to keep buying from those whose ideas you don't like.
(Note: "keeping someone on your payroll" = "keep buying from them".)
>There should be social consequences for your speech, just not legal ones.
I just explained how the standard grounding for free speech doesn't distinguish between social vs legal consequences, and how the latter are only one part of the puzzle. If you dispute that logic, I'd like to hear your thinking.
The immediate problem I see with extending free speech protection to keeping your job is something like this:
Suppose a company has a disgruntled employee. The employee starts badmouthing them all over the place. Assume it doesn't rise to the level of libel or slander, but they're still causing significant problems. Is the company supposed to be required to keep employing this person or face a freedom-of-speech lawsuit? That seems absurd.
The fundamental problem here I think is the assumption that an employer is somehow "responsible" for the employee's livelihood. Employment is a simple business transaction. Neither party should be obligated to anything beyond what they agreed to at the start of the transaction. If you go buy an apple from a store, are you now responsible for that store-owner's livelihood from then on? Are you obligated to keep buying apples there and buying enough to provide the storeowner a living wage?
If someone is living so far outside their means that a temporary job loss is going to cause them ruin, that's their fault, not the company's. There's much we could do in terms of providing a better social safety net as well, but I think we're best off keeping economic transactions as purely economic as possible.
That is why the problem is not corporations' ability to fire employees, but whether that corporation is a monopoly, i. e. that employee's only option for employment.
For a corporation with competition, the ability to fire someone over disagreement is clearly reasonable, since that employee may prefer work with another corporation in that sector.
To contrast: For a monopoly, the ability to fire someone over disagreement, and no other merit, is suddenly transformed into an abuse over free speech. The employee can't speak out against a monopoly, and expect to find work afterward, meaning that employee has poignant reason not to speak out in the first place.
Also, a corollary: employment monopolies can be established with blacklists.
Refusing to hire someone because they were placed on a blacklist for protected speech is wrong (and I believe, illegal). After the Damore incident there were numerous reports of people within Google openly bragging about maintaining such blacklists.
Suppose a company has a disgruntled employee. The employee starts badmouthing them all over the place. Assume it doesn't rise to the level of libel or slander, but they're still causing significant problems. Is the company supposed to be required to keep employing this person or face a freedom-of-speech lawsuit? That seems absurd.
In this case you document the incidents. You establish a pattern and attempt to demonstrate intent or reckless disregard with regards to the impact of speech on the company and its business, in quantifiable terms if possible. You appeal to previously established, legally valid agreements made between the employer and the employee on what sort of speech restrictions are expected. And then when you fire the person, you tell the truth. You explain exactly why the relationship was terminated, how their exercise of free speech damages the company, and how they themselves are responsible for it.
The trick is really when it comes to actually proving that an employee is "causing significant problems" when their actions cannot actually be classified as libel, slander, or some form of harassment.
The fundamental problem here I think is the assumption that an employer is somehow "responsible" for the employee's livelihood. Employment is a simple business transaction.
No, the fundamental assumption is that any actor has a responsibility to uphold business agreements in an honest and ethical manner. This includes not using the threat of termination as leverage to suppress exercise of 1st amendment rights. That includes making reasonable attempt to respond to speech with speech before taking action, and ONLY escalating to disruptive action against the speaker when there is a clear and compelling reason to do so.
I'm all for at-will employment in principle. But the story doesn't end there. Just because you "can sometimes be justified firing someone for things they say" doesn't mean it's always the right thing to do. You have to look at each situation to make a reasonable evaluation. In this case, according to Lynn, Google applied economic pressure to (supposedly nonpartisan) New America to coerce them into into punishing Barry Lynn for praising an EU decision that hurt Google.
Lynn was not an employee of Google. Lynn was doing his job, the way he was supposed to do his job, in a principled manner which he claims is consistent with how he'd done it for the past 15 years. He and his division were employed through a 3rd party organization of which Google was simply one funder. Google, rather than responding to Lynn with a counter argument or some other speech-oriented response, instead abused their patron relationship with his employer to punish him for what he said.
Whether or not New America had "responsibility for the livelihood" of the employees is entirely beside the point. The point is to address the accusation of Google engaging in a wholly inappropriate bullying behavior. It appears they set out with intent punish someone for valid political expression using a coercive method (threatening the speaker's employer). That is the general principle at stake here. Responding to free speech with coercive action is by default unethical.
I think your simplification misses an important distinction which you address later in your comment. The first amendment protects from reprisals from the government. If we are in a world where the government suppresses speech we are in a different kind of dystopia than one where corporations do the same thing.
The solution will be different because the way we interact with our government is different from the way we interact with corporations.
This is true, but it does mean we have drag people past thinking about free speech strictly in terms of the 1st amendment. All too often people respond to a situation like the OP with "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" and consider the discussion over. Parent poster has clearly experienced this.
See also: Marsh vs. Alabama. Relates more to platforms like Youtube and Twitter but is still relevant.
Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, notwithstanding the fact that the sidewalk where the distribution was taking place was part of a privately owned company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment.
You claimed that the disaster is the same if the government or a corporation is doing the censoring. I'm arguing that there's a difference between corporate and government censorship and as a result our reaction as a society is necessarily different.
He criticized a "corporation" one that gets criticized on HN somewhat often.
As for At-Will states, you can't fire someone for any reason, because there are employment protection laws. And, as anyone who has worked in positions of authority can attest, even if you have to fire someone, you build up enough evidence so that when you are sued, you can back up your claims.
Isn't that what at-will employment is? From my last employer's handbook:
Employment at the Company is at will. The policy of at-will employment means that employment with the Company, is voluntarily entered into, and you are free to resign at will at any time, with or without notice or cause.
The policy also means that the Company may terminate your employment at will at any time, with or without notice or cause.
This right to terminate employment with or without notice or cause also applies, of course, to decisions regarding other terms of employment, including but not limited to demotion, promotion, transfer, compensation, benefits, duties, and location of work. No representative of the Company, other than one of the Principals, has the authority to enter into any agreement for employment for a specified duration or to make any agreement contrary to foregoing. Any such agreement must be by individual agreement, in writing and signed by you and one of the Principals. Accordingly, neither this manual nor any policy contained in this manual is intended to imply continued employment or otherwise limit in any way the policy of at-will employment. Nor does this manual, in describing Company policies or procedures, commit the Company, to follow any particular procedure in the course of imposing discipline, changing the terms or conditions of employment, or terminating
Yes, at anytime, and with our without reason. However, doing so can open you up to a lawsuit for wrongful termination.
You can't be fired because of sex (including orientation and pregnancy), race, religion, disability, age, or nation of origin.
Retaliation, refusal to commit a crime, and failure to follow your companies own termination process, are also grounds for wrongful termination claims.
Typically, HR departments have a firing manager start building a paper trail of evidence, usually by way of a PiP.
Regardless, the company still wields all the power. Whereas, if you're hoping to leave on good terms, employees are still expected to put in two weeks (or at least one week's) notice they can still let you go that day.
Also, I know further in this handbook I have, that they describe that there are procedures for "building the case" as you say but then in the same paragraph it basically says: "We don't actually have to do this".
Not to mention the whole back half of the packet deals with arbitration, which is how I assume this would be dealt w/ in court.
A fired employee doesn't have the time and probably access to the lawyers to even get this started not to mention have a hope of winning.
Hell, at this company, I came in on time, fixed three issues within my first hour, then was laid off due to "cultural fit" despite two year's of stellar performance reviews and no formal reprimands or complaints to HR.
AFAIK, no one can take away your legal right to bring about a suit.
If your company has an arbitration clause, it's usually as part of an employee agreement that specifies in-lieu of suing them, you agree to an arbitration instead.
I've turned down a job because I refused to give up my right to sue.
As to your case, just sue them and claim cultural fit was used to discriminate against you because of your race/gender/age.
It's not a big deal. From all I've heard from sources, they've been suffering in my absence.
Also, as a straight, white male in his 30s, I can't really be discriminated against on the grounds you state. Not to mention, I'm paying 3/4 of my unemployment to rent so don't really have the room to pay hundreds of bucks to even get in a room with a lawyer.
I recall reading over the handbook but probably not that arbitration part. That was a surprise when going back to it today. It's also something I had no idea about until the past year or so with all these stories coming out about it.
The people with real power in America, connected insiders, the also uber rich, and their media mouth pieces are turning on Google.
This is a call to arms by an elite to elites. Not a call for a fairer market.
Google has gotten away with treating users like products since forever. That won't change since that's how all tech and media companies thrive.
That Google is manipulating the elite behind closed doors is the problem being highlighted. Nothing substantial about how it abuses the public for its own gain.
Note too how this is being posted in Jeff Bezos's paper. This could have been a press release or some industry post, blog, but it's getting prestigious lift.
Right after the "free speech" situation at Google.
Little to NO sustained outrage over their role in the employee recruiting ban with Apple and others, depressing wages for the tech industry.
But it sure feels like today Google alone is being targeted with a wave of negative media coverage.
Note Amazon just rode into our backyards with its barely vetted purchase of Whole Foods.
Businesses large and small can make business decisions. But only especially large businesses can go around making "offers you can't refuse" to every think tank in order to get what they want.
All states except Montana at 0.32% of the population.
99.68% of the population of the US are in at-will employment states. Most everyone is under at-will.
The negative consequence is that if you cannot have a meaningful income to survive while exercising your rights, do you have a right to begin with?
That is the crux of the issue with Google being a monopoly.
If you work for a company, and speak out against that company, there is no reason for that company to be forced to keep you. They can kick you out, and if you are fired simply over disagreement, you can find another company. The very availability of that option is how you are free to speak against your corporation. You need not stay there.
If that company is a monopoly, however, you are left without that option, and therefore left without the liberty to speak freely against that company. You can still speak out against them, and get fired like before, but then you are left with no avenue of employment afterward; and since you are thus aware, you likely won't be speaking out after all.
BL: I wrote a paper on the dangers of corporate monopolies and how they have a dangerous ability to silence their critics, stifle civil liberties, and control public discourse.
ES: Google is a near-monopoly. One might view your paper as criticism--criticism that I might like to silence.
BL: Oh, sh-
ES: You're fired! Also, I'll have my guys tweak the ranking algorithm a bit. Enjoy finding yourself on page 1000 of the search results for "Barry Lynn".
BL: (squeak)
ES: [impression of Agent Smith from The Matrix] What good is a phone call when you cannot... speak? Bwahahahaha!
For the purpose of 1st amendment protection, you can criticize your employer with impunity. You can criticize the government with impunity, too.
What most people mean when they talk about their freedom of speech is the privilege of speaking without losing their job. I find it to be a tragic if not fatal misunderstanding pervasive to discussions about speech.
Think tanks are a little different. It's closer to a professor getting fired for pursuing research that casts a bad light on a corporate donor to the school. What's the most troubling to me is not that this individual was fired, but his entire line of inquiry was ejected by Google.
Think tanks have always been biased research institutions used to shape policy. When you don't play ball for the entity funding the team be prepared to not play for that team anymore.
One of the perks of university is there's hopefully a little more distance between admin and fund raising and research, plus tenure, diverse funding, etc. to counteract exactly this scenario.
From the title I had initially assumed it was about the infamous memo. For anybody else who might get the same impression: it's a different story and it's actually worth reading.
If it's a valid criticism of a significant issue, why would it be necessary for the target of a criticism to fund it? Surely there would enough injured parties who have a reason to fund it.
What if the significant issue is that the injured parties do not have the resources to speak? The validity of criticism should not be linked to economic power of the injured.
I agree that the target of criticism should not be required to fund that speech and that the freedom of speech also applies to the right to not speak.
My comment deals with your second sentence.
> Surely there would enough injured parties who have a reason to fund it.
You suggest that criticism is valid only if the injured have the economic power to speak. This is a dangerous way to determine validity because it forms a feedback loop where those with economic power suppress the speech of those without.
> Corporations are geared to pursue their interests, and criticism is not in their best interest.
Obviously we should condemn this behavior, but I can't say I'm surprised. It's good to see such a clear example of Google being unable to resist exerting its power to protect itself from criticism, but I can't help but imagine all of the instances of this that will never see the light of day. The reality is that our world is filled with greed and corruption and that's not going to change any time soon.
It's not even about them being unable to resist. Schmidt is on record saying that he feels that their success is a function of/reward for doing what's morally correct and that the company should use its power to push their morality/ideology (and that the market will reward them if they're right or won't if they aren't).
Yes, Jeff Bezos. The implication that Bezos abuses his position to favor one organization over the other has no clear basis in fact. It is also not relevant to the story about Google taking action in Google's favor.
The difference being Eric Schmidt and Google took an action. Eric Schmidt and some other business he owns did not.
The action was against an organization that Google was doing business with because the arrangement no longer made sense for Google. A think tank and a newspaper are not the same thing. There is no expectation of integrity from a think tank.
The original comparison suggests Amazon is abusing influence to control the narrative at WaPo in the absence of any evidence of such abuse.
In an older version of the claims[0], it was Eric Schmidt (as individual), Eric Schmidt's family foundation and Google who were listed as donors that might drop out.
That older version was also much less clear on what was "threatened".
That guy is using outrage as marketing vehicle to raise funds and awareness for his (now "independent") think tank. It'll be interesting to see who's funding his work in a year or so.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon are not the same person. This is an important distinction.
No doubt you can point to some Amazon PR to prove it. In reality, they're one and Bezos has done whatever he wanted till now (how many years was AMZN losing money to expand???).
You can also say "Here's an WP article slamming Amazon," but maybe the old WP would have written 5 such articles. I have no doubt that self-censorship goes on at WP just as it went with NBC /GE /Comcast and so on. They know who owns the paper and if someone has to remind them, it will be done.
Of course, you can be independent and think, but....
You can make up whatever reality you want. Suggesting Bezos abuses his influence at WaPo to benefit Amazon has nothing to do with Google deciding to stop doing business with an organization that began working against Google's interest.
You ascribe malicious intent when it's just really organizational dynamics. Most suppression of dissent is self-censorship. Most folks know when they're about to bite the hand that feeds them.
They've actually been critical multiple times over the last little while about Amazon and Amazon's model, particularly along working conditions at warehouses. I think editorial independence is still relatively strong at wapo.
Interestingly enough New America also receives significant funding from Amazon, I wonder if they will get colored by the brush of politically expedient think tank funding as well.
Are think tanks legally required to be impartial? Are they generally expected to be impartial?
I was under the impression that funding a "Think Tank" was a way to funnel money into research, paper-writing, policy promulgation, etc. that favored your position. Are they something else?
I'd imagine that funding and investments are a way to pressure research to favor your stance as a company. While think tanks can operate under their own rules, as an investor you'd probably not want to spend more money if the result isn't helping you in some way.
Phrased a different way I think technically it's not a requirement to follow your investors' goals, but it's pretty much a necessity so your hands are tied.
Only thing a company owes you is what is in your contact and vice versa. I don't understand what people don't get about this. If you criticize the government and get thrown in jail, that's a violation of free speech. But If you complain about your employer then they can fire you. If you don't like your employer, you can leave. That's how it works. End of story.
The guy is publishing an article in a major news publication about his experiences during all of this. His free speech is quite obviously not being suppressed.
What is the point of think tanks then? Just get paid by companies and do their propaganda but expect people to believe your thoughts are free because it's a "non-profit"?
Well, that's a good question for the think tanks. I imagine they always want more funding, so they reach out to corporations, and ultimately find themselves in conflict. I'm sure they'd argue that, without the corporate money, they wouldn't exist in the first place. Catch 22.
The crux of the issue he is describing is not that his speech rights are being violated, but that Google has the power to fire him from a company that is not part of Google. And that Google used that power in reaction to his speech.
> If you don't like your employer, you can leave. That's how it works. End of story.
And go where? Another similar company, right?
While that isn't what happened in this specific situation, this guy brings up a valid point about monopolies: If you work for a company, and that company is a monopoly, you can't just leave, because you have literally nowhere else to go. Therefore that company has control over your speech without violating your constitutional rights.
That is one of many reasons we should be concerned about the centralization of power Google/Alphabet has acquired.
> The guy is publishing an article in a major news publication about his experiences during all of this. His free speech is quite obviously not being suppressed.
His speech clearly was suppressed. Just because he found a new outlet for it does not mean anything to the contrary.
Is it suppression when your employer declines to use their power to amplify a message they don't agree with? Seems like that crosses the line into expecting others to help you speak, which is not a right.
Eric Schmidt didn't hire Barry Lynn. New America did.
Perhaps a better analogy: The same way I would be petty, if I fired a painter I hired, because he showed up with wearing a Colin Kaepnernick Jersey and my neighbor the police officer, who lets me borrow his lawnmower, was furious.
Still doesn't seem petty. You have a long standing relationship with your neighbor, and care about him. You don't have much of a relationship with the painter.
One of the aspects of this I'm most interested in is when Google started donating to New America. It seems obvious to me that Google is giving money to political organizations in exchange for influence and that both parties here share blame. But if Google started giving money to New America and Eric Schmidt joined the board knowing that New America was funding an anti-monopoly group then I think that makes Google and Eric look a lot worse.
How many think tank papers have been quietly shredded because the author didn't have the courage Barry Lynn did?
The whole think tank industry is like this. This is one of the main reasons why things like single payer don't have the intellectual backing of rigorous white papers and advocacy -- there isn't a whole lot of money to be made for corporations lowering the cost of healtcare.
> there isn't a whole lot of money to be made for corporations lowering the cost of healtcare.
I don't know if that's true. There are a lot of companies that would save money if healthcare was cheaper -- pretty much every company in America is a health-care consumer. It's just that benefits are diffuse and the downsides of lower-cost health care are concentrated.
Then the smaller firms could be acquired. As it is, because of the slowing new-company generation, large firms have been getting fewer and fewer options. Small firms can take risks to create new products and processes which can then be acquired and taken up and expanded by large companies. Generally its much more difficult for a large company to do that creation part in-house. So insufficient small firms end up affecting the large-firm capability in the end.
Unfortunately this type of long term benefit for the large corporation doesn't affect the next quarterly report and is ignored in favor of more short term gains.
Productivity gains seem to be dropping and one theory is that companies are getting larger, but aren't able to pickup efficiency/new value generation boosts from acquisitions like they once were able to (at an economy wide scale, not talking about the acquisitions of any specific company or even sectors here). It is difficult to make any certain conclusions here though. But if true, they will have to care sooner or later.
Maybe, but they LOVE the huge competitive advantage it gives them over smaller and more nimble firms nipping at their market share, because it's very onerous for small businesses to competitively offer health benefits.
I think large companies love it the way it is. Healthcare being so tightly bound to employment makes it more difficult for employees to leave, which probably has a dampening affect on salaries. I haven't had to deal with it in a while, but getting healthcare for a small company ~10 years ago was a nightmare.
It wasn't too bad for us. We provide gold level healthcare for our employees (~20 FTEs). Companies like Zenefits (yes yes I know) and others have made it a lot simpler to get started.
I don't care about the price. I pay for insurance for my employees because it is the right thing to do.
The comment I am referring to is the nightmare of the setup, not the cost to me for providing the healthcare. And many middleware insurance navigators make it easy to provide it (at least for me).
I don't know about that. If your employer were to pay you more and you were to use your salary to buy health insurance, you'd be bumped into a higher tax bracket and you'd be using post tax money to buy the insurance.
It's not a long term benefit because the government should be able to lower taxes given the increased revenue, but you'd never look past the short term (and the government would never lower taxes).
I think this is a bit of a just-so story. Rebuttals:
* There are top-tier progressive think-tanks that write favorably about single-payer; EPI is an example.
* Single-payer is ideologically anathema to conservatives and libertarians, so a majority of think tanks are going to be constitutionally incapable of proposing plans.
* For the past 8 years or so, progressives have been working to support the health care victory they already achieved in the ACA, which has been under continuous assault since the GOP regained control of the legislature. It would be weird to see them endorsing a new health care system (and, in the process, conceding defeat on the ACA).
>>Single-payer is ideologically anathema to libertarians
For Libertarians (LP), maybe. There are plenty of libertarians who see initiatives like single-payer and UBI as the only way to reduce graft and overspending of the federal government, knowing that pure elimination is impossible.
Yes, if you combine it with reducing absurd controls of the industry. Libertarians tend to be angry about the fact that Americans cannot buy medicine abroad, that medical schools are absurdly regulated, coupling insurance with jobs, and so forth. Single-payer + those reforms are well within a reasonable libertarian platform.
I'm not an expert on libertarianism, but I looked at the first results from that search and it seems like some libertarians support some form of single-payer but purely as a political compromise, which I assume is what you were referring to. It still doesn't jibe with the ideology, but they seem to think that certain forms of single-payer might be better than what exists now.
Yeah, pretty much. I used to be a libertarian and know a lot of people who are, and many regard it as a reasonable compromise and a strict upgrade over the nonsense we have now.
Not really. Advocates of any ideology can compromise their ideals pragmatically, but libertarians explicitly cannot countenance single-payer as an end state. The idea of a government-run monopoly on health care is directly contrary to libertarianism.
Which is what you see when you read posts from libertarians about single-payer. Single-payer as a compromise, and only if accompanied by such a radical deregulation of medicine that "single-payer" is really just an economic subsidy for consumers on a private marketplace. That's a coherent (if, to me, terrifying) plan, but it's not what mainstream policy thinkers mean by single-payer!
Again: I'm not saying a libertarian can't accept single-payer as a temporary compromise (even for very long definitions of "temporary"). But if you find single-payer attractive, you're an economic liberal.
ACA is structurally designed to be a stepping stone to a more rational system. I don't think you'll find a lot of ACA boosters who think healthcare in the US is a solved problem because of it.
Wow. That's really disturbing actually...The layers of power and control are so mind bogglingly intricate. Eric Schmidt just demonstrated how finely tuned and detailed power actually is today. To know of a single paper and effectively flip a switch to shut it down. The Google of 'do no evil' is certainly dead. Where does this leave us in changing these things? What options are there for gaining momentum for real change when all the powers that be fight against it?
>there isn't a whole lot of money to be made for corporations lowering the cost of healtcare.
There is a whole lot of money to be made by special interests in giving people free heathcare at the taxpayers expense. It means massively increasing government spending afterall, and that gives those with political control more resources to divvy up. And there's an enormous amount of advocacy for single payer. It also does not reduce costs.
> why things like single payer don't have the intellectual backing of rigorous white papers and advocacy
I dont understand why Gates or Buffett who have made comments supporting single payer systems dont fund such think tanks who will "educate" the public about single payer.
I don't necessarily disagree. But it is a good moment to remind everyone that those white papers have a man behind the curtain. It's also a nice cultural moment for anti-trust (admittedly my pet issue.)
>People don't tend to pay other people to tell them their baby is ugly.
Sure but if I have an ugly baby and I start funding a group called "The Baby Raters" and I watch and continue donating as they judge all of my friends babies to be ugly but then pull funding (or threaten to) when they judge my baby as ugly, I'd say that I've successfully undermined the institution. It's no longer what it says on the tin.
But if Google started giving money to New America and Eric Schmidt joined the board knowing that New America was funding an anti-monopoly group then I think that makes Google and Eric look a lot worse
Schmidt joined the board in 2008. Lynn says he has been doing this research since 1999.
I could argue that Mr. Lynn is crying "sour grapes" over this, but he also came very close to a point Bryan Lunduke made recently about Google[1]. Google has the power to stop people using their products from making a living, and a collapse or compromise of Google's infrastructure would cause untold economic harm to the nation and world. If Google as an "information provider" fails (search, email, telecommunications, DNS services, cloud services, etc.) a lot of other businesses stop or collapse.
A healthy economy is a lot like a healthy ecosystem: some parts are weaker, some will fail when stressed, but allowing the system to react naturally to inputs will likely result in a better outcome. But when you encourage a monoculture, single stresses can result in a complete collapse[2]. We're experimenting with establishing monocultures in our economies with potentially even more impact than those of the 19th and 20th centuries (like Standard Oil) that inspired the anti-monopoly regulation and legislation: if Samsung were to shut down tomorrow, what would be the impact on the Korean, regional and world economies?
An all-powerful Google that can't accept criticism or action to "trim it back" to preserve the overall economy represents a danger and Mr. Lynn was right to point this out.
Funnily enough I mentioned Standard Oil in relation to Google and Facebook on here the other day, I'd read some terrible Clive Cussler novel that had Rockefeller as a character and that sent me of to read more about him.
> If Google as an "information provider" fails (search, email, telecommunications, DNS services, cloud services, etc.) a lot of other businesses stop or collapse.
Seems a bit of an exaggeration. Let's pretend we got word from an all-powerful being that Google and all of its services were going to disappear from the face of the earth in exactly 30 days, giving everyone including users, competitors, partners, etc. plenty of time to prepare. 30 days from now, specifically, what collapses?
> Let's pretend.. that Google and all of its services were going to [shut down] in exactly 30 days
That wasn't the question the post above was asking. The question wasn't "given a chance to prepare, would the economy collapse," the question was "if Google were to suddenly collapse, would our economy survive?"
There exist several single points of failure in our global economy. Given the incredible importance Google has in our economy, with search, email, collaboration software, and cloud computing, it's not a stretch to say that Google is one of those points of failure.
It's also a location of power concentration. Google basically controls the internet as most see it. If your site is removed from Google, its chance of becoming popular is almost completely removed. If you are forced off of Google and you aren't prepared, you could lose years of important information. They also track nearly everyone, opening up the possibility of corporate population control and cultural shaping.
Do we really want single corporations this powerful?
The parent didn't specify a time frame, just that a failure of Google would result in "untold economic harm to the nation and world". Even if they went away tomorrow with no notice, sure there would be some pain and a lot of IT departments would be pulling in extra hours for some months, but come on...
I have relatives who are in education, and I was fairly shocked to hear how Google has taken over that space. I don't think this is a good thing at all. Not sure what can be done about it, though. If they become as dominant here as they are elsewhere, they really could control the world's information from cradle to grave. takes tin foil hat off
1. Every business that's running on GCE. They can't just "move off the service" in 30 days. This is a big one. Billions of dollars. Coca Cola obviously couldn't move in 30 days. Nor Airbus.
2. Every business that's running on GSuite. Let's assume this is mostly small business, and they will have limited ability to migrate to other SaaS or run in house replacements for these services.
3. Everyone who was using Youtube as a primary source of income, or whose business had a critical dependency on the Youtube platform for marketing
4. Every piece of code that depends on Google's DNS infrastructure, and anything that pulls DNS entries from 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4... how many devices like this do you think there are? How many were hard coded?
5. What happens to Android? It's a hypothetical, but potentially it could keep going, but let's assume major disruptions for everyone who runs a business that develops mobile applications for Android
6. How many people (and businesses) depend on Google Maps? How many are tied in directly to the API and won't be able to change this easily?
7. Now how many depend on Google Voice?
8. Gmail has more than 1 billion active monthly users.
I don't know if you're actually looking for a specific list of businesses, but that's not going to be possible for anyone to provide -- anyway, a shutdown of Google services would be an economic catastrophe... Most people couldn't even migrate a Gmail account in 30 days, and with Gmail alone we're already talking a billion+ people.
These all look like fixable problems, certainly not easily fixable, but also not on the level of "untold economic harm to the nation and world" and business collapse. My comment was that the parent was exaggerating, not that the loss wouldn't be temporarily painful to some companies.
so .... if you can actually move a business from GCE to AWS in 30 days, will you please send me your resume? I'd like to hire you for a -- short -- contract :)
Seriously though, I think you're greatly underestimating how high the switching cost is to move from one cloud provider to another.
I used most of Google's services. I thought they were great, but them I met a neighbour of mine that held such hatred toward them that I could only describe it as visceral. He told me a story of how he used Gmail, Docs, chat, Blogger, but as a director YouTube was the most important. One day his account was locked. Google decided he had used YouTube inappropriately and suspended his account. No recourse, no remedy, but more importantly his data and online identity were instantly gone.
And then I thought about it, what if it happened to me? And that was the end of the Google for me, death to my Apple ecosystem, and hello DNS registrations and safety deposit boxes with the backups of my data.
SaaS is a Chinese Finger trap though, so the further you are in....
Which doesn't work so well when Google keeps pushing consolidation down your throat. I never wanted my accounts merged, but they went ahead and did it anyway.
This is a good point, but how would this cause Google's business branch (advertising) from collapsing? Businesses want to advertise, and their service here is reputable.
Except for the definition of "evil" is pretty grey. If Google believes that their worldview is the "good", then people who challenge that viewpoint are necessarily harming the good and therefore shutting them down would not be evil at all.
I and the entire Open Markets team were let go because it’s not in Google’s interest to finance criticism of its business model. It’s as simple as that.
Right. Where's the scandal here? If you don't want someone or some company to have monetary power over you, then don't take money from them. I understand that it's not so simple, but at the end of the day this can't be surprising.
To wit...his prefacing comment says a lot:
No think tank wants to appear beholden to the demands of its corporate donors.
Operative word being - appear. In fact they all are beholden, of course, you just want to make sure not to appear to be.
The scandal is that most of the policy research in the US is funded by supposedly-neutral think tanks which are funded this way— which means new laws will usually be designed to serve the big interests that fund think tanks.
This is it. So many people appear unable to understand criticism at a structural level. As long as every individual or corporation is acting as you'd expect them to act given the conditions they're in, we're supposed to throw up our hands.
But of course we don't have to do that. We can note the various reasons things work this way — growing monopoly power, tax laws governing nonprofits, lobbying regulations — and figure out how to change them.
Not to sound glib but that's nothing new and everyone in the research world knows that. The only new thing here is that it's a public story involving Google.
Who told you they were supposed to be neutral? The only thing I expect from a think tank is reproducibility of results, if they are making claim to an objective result.
That's not entirely true, laws are also designed by politicians and bureaucrats, which means they'll also be written to serve politicians (incumbent advantages, for example) and bureaucracy itself (agencies don't generally lobby for more focused goals).
Point being, I agree it's a shame, and I would love something better, but at some point we're saying laws are written by people and interest groups, which is pretty obvious and unavoidable.
Yes exactly. It's hard to take this guy seriously when monopoly profits were paying his bills.
Note that when he was publishing monopoly research there was no problem, it was the decision to 'celebrate' the EU fine that seems to have got him fired.
Sooo... if anyone at google wants to make the 'I feel lucky' link for 'streisand effect' go to this article, that would be a great easter egg.. just saying..
Regarding concentration of corporate power and economics, Nick Hanauer was on the 1A yesterday [1] and had relevant commentary. He also brought up problems with inequality a few years ago [2] and last month [3].
If you justify capitalism, this entire story is mundane. I am surprised to hear so much complaint about a private employment termination. I guess it's just the sound of so many bubbles popping. It's like no one knew how think tanks work.
I used to buy videogames at a Gamestop next to my neighborhood supermarket. At one point, they had an employee that seemed to love to make unnecessary negative comments about my taste in games. It's a manager's prerogative to fire the employee for providing a bad customer experience, just like it was mine to just get my games somewhere else. Ultimately donors are think tank customers, and this is all perfectly fine: A world where I am forced to go to the same store, or a Gamestop manager has to tolerate an employee that tries to deter people from buying non-microsoft products, is probably worse than one where someone on a think tank has to measure what they say.
There's learnings to had here though: The case of a think tank relying on very few donors is no different than a B2B startup that relies on a single enterprise company: You have a tremendous risk, the funding can disappear at any time, and for any reason. Anything other than diversification puts you at risk, and it's not really the customer's fault if you put yourself in a very weak position.
This also affects far bigger fish, like media companies and even legislators. And that's why we should have care when it comes to both media consolidation, or mechanisms where very few people can have a very big influence in the outcome of an election. But it's not as if we live in a world where the only way to have a think tank that produces policy proposals is to clear everything with Google.
The retail example is an oversimplification. When the consumers of a company's product are also its primary source of revenue, nobody is under any illusions about who that company is responsible to. You are the person most impacted by Gamestop's customer experience, and you are also the main way Gamestop makes money. Your satisfaction is paramount, so it makes total sense for a company to fire people who don't deliver. Similar example: there's nothing irresponsible about insisting your public relations firm writes you a flattering press release, because everyone understands that a press release is paid for by the company it concerns.
A think tank is a different sort of animal. The donor is not the main entity impacted by the policy proposals the think tank produces. Just like a responsible media outlet must have a notion of journalistic integrity, or a legislator's office should feel beholden to its constituents, a think tank has a responsibility to provide sound policy advice to its readers.
You can take the position that "think tanks do not have any level of responsibility to the people who consume their policy proposals" but I certainly would not follow you there. Policy institutes present themselves as rigorously data-driven nonprofits and write with an impartial air. If criticism / negative results are known to lead directly to a loss of funding, then it is disingenuous for the think tank to present itself as impartial, and I would consider it compromised.
We tend to solve this problem with regulatory agencies that represent the impacted consumer (and not the source of revenue), though I would note that this is the very solution the author was fired for praising.
This is more proof if needed of how damaging most think tanks are to public discourse and the incestuous relationships that prop them up.
They are very much part of the regulatory capture framework in operation around power centres. It seems as easy as adopting highly deceptive orwellian sounding names and shamelessly pushing agendas while pretending to be independent.
Consumers and citizens end up paying for all this subterfuge in increased end user costs and are basically paying for organized attempts to mislead them.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadSay I'm 80% evil and I fund a think tank. The think tank's reputation was 100, and now it's 60 with regard to statements about me because my funding it makes it seem biased. If it published a story that says I'm actually 4% evil, then it gets a reputation boost, I'm not looking as bad as I actually am, and I'm well positioned to let the organization do positive spin when I really need it.
I would say that Google and similar orgs actually usually do this. But Google and Amazon are getting really, really nervous when people talk about monopoly. If anti-trust comes back into vogue, and it could possibly, then it's an existential threat for these empires. They have to carefully manage their carrots and sticks on this issue, and with this one they went with the stick.
Of course one could argue that nobody funds you if nobody trusts you. Interesting to see how this one pans out...
This guy is just trying to sell a book.
Or am i mistaken and think tanks are usually politically neutral pure-research organizations?
As a lobbying strategy it would be a little like Google trying to take financial control over Cato or Heritage, not to get those think tanks to spew pro-Google stuff, but to ensure that the primary conservative and libertarian voices in Washington were unable to criticize Google.
(Cato's relationship with the Koch brothers gets similar criticism).
It's definitely fraught! But New America isn't a victim here.
"Think tanks" are influence laundering operations.
If someone or some corporation wants something (anything) done, it is more persuasive when the proposed ideas come from an ostensibly neutral organization rather than a transparently self-interested one.
This works well or it wouldn't be done this way. This is also why influence laundering organizations will fight tooth and nail to defend the appearance of funding-independence while knowing quite well that it's a lie: the appearance of neutrality is the product they are selling to patrons, and if they can't sell product they will go out of business.
2) That would create a clear conflict of interest. This post is an example of what can happen when you have only one source of funding which you may need to criticize.
And no i will not trial every newspaper for an article linked on hn.
This feels like a bit of an exaggeration in this situation, no? I mean, some states have at-will employment where they can just fire you for any reason they want. And if you're doing things that are actively working against them, of course they're going to want to part ways with you. And even in states without that, I'm sure there's some clause in their contract that says "if you speak out against us we have the option of terminating you." That's not really a free speech issue at that point, right? Their free speech isn't being hindered or taken away at all. Rather, a business is making business decisions based on your speech, which happen to effect you.
EDIT: to clarify, I'm all for the world getting more ethical. I was just kind of arguing a semantic: free speech is mostly known for being a civil liberty, and Google technically isn't restricting that in this case.
Whistleblowing? You could argue you have a moral obligation to your fellow citizens. Not arguing, just offering an example.
Ipso facto, he worked for Schmidt/Google.
- derive enjoyment of begging victims than indifferent ones
- respect someone whom is willing to pay the price
Furthermore, in way, this is what Christians and nonviolent leaders like Gandi originally meant about "turn the other cheek"... not being meek and defenseless but to volunteer for punishment. The bully or abuser is confused and/or gives respect for such, and then is more likely to stop doing it. It's not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing. Only a good guy with a gun or having massive balls and a plan, can stop a bad guy with a gun. ;)
By all means shame NA for this, but thinking that it's a scandal that the non-profit world works for corporate donors is naiive.
That is what Google did, just not because of integrity.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000067823
It's literally the best investment they could make[1]:
"Between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. A year-long analysis by the Sunlight Foundation suggests, however, that what they gave pales compared to what those same corporations got: $4.4 trillion in federal business and support"
[1]https://sunlightfoundation.com/2014/11/17/fixed-fortunes-big...
> New America is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and all donations are tax deductible.
- https://www.newamerica.org/our-funding/
So while they do receive funding from Google, if Google is permitted to control the discourse in this way we should ask if New America deserves non-profit status and whether Google should be able to deduct monies spent on the entity.
It's likewise fair to question whether any person donating to that organization deserves to write off their donations if the receiving organization acts more like a pr division of the giver.
My personal opinion is that if an organization receives more than 50% of it's funding from one source, it's no longer independent and shouldn't be treated as such
In this aspect, google would be well within its rights to discontinue funding speech it no longer agreed with. Its within its rights to attempt to influence a narrative.
But there are optics associated with this, and people who may be (rightfully or wrongfully) suspicious of its motives, who would take such actions as confirmation of their own pet theories.
Without reflecting on how common a pattern this is, if this is what happened, then it happened. And its not wrong for google to ask for tighter conformity to its preferred narrative. Its not wrong for the think tank to offer this tighter conformity.
It just looks ... well ... bad.
Google acting in their own self interest is rational. Doesn't mean its "good" or "bad" in a wider context, but it is rational.
But looks like people thought I was serious.
Very hard to argue against free speech with a mission statement focused on ideas, research, and "public conversation"
For fun, the Open Markets division in particular:
The Open Markets program at New America was founded to protect liberty and democracy in America from extreme concentrations of economic and political power. We do so by researching and reporting on the political and economic dangers posed by monopolization—in the United States and in the international system—and identifying ways to reestablish America’s political economy on a more fair, secure, and stable footing.
Google gave money to a non-profit with an anti-monopoly division and then got mad when the anti-monopoly division praised anti-monopoly legislation that just happened to hurt Google.
The 1st amendment protects speech from government consequences, even though it isn't absolute. Consequences in the private market still reduce the freedom of speech even though they have nothing to do with the Constitution.
And if someone finds their freedom reduced, they can perfectly reasonably complain about it. And you can rationally talk about how the reduction was fair or that it wasn't. You can't rationally deny the reduction.
EDIT: I barely ever do this sort of edit, but c'mon. People downvoted this? It's like some people are opposed to plain truth. Nothing above is remotely questionable.
As someone pointed in previous similar topic, this reason can't be illegal, and potentially this threatens his constitutional free-speech rights in this case.
> I'm sure there's some clause in their contract that says "if you speak out against us we have the option of terminating you."
Again, if some contract provision is against constitution, it is not enforceable.
The philosophy behind freedom of speech is (to greatly simplify) "it's so much better for the advancement of ideas when people can say controversial things without being afraid of material reprisals."
One way to promote the ideal is to not push legal penalties against those who say such things. That's the basis of the legal protection of speech, and specific countries' laws thereon (in the US, the First Amendment).
But you get the same disaster, and failure of the ideal, when non-governmental actors do it. If everyone fears going into poverty when they say something controversial, well, we're in the same crappy-ideas-that-no-one-criticizes dystopia.
Hence my frustration at those who give the lecture about "lol First Amendment is just for the government" and "lol why should they have to pay you when they don't like your ideas?" Yes, they're technically correct, but it's comically missing the point to "stand up for free speech" but also cheer on the technically-legal ways you can make someone suffer for disagreeing with you.
That doesn't mean we should force you to keep buying from those whose ideas you don't like. It does mean we shouldn't be sanguine about orgs using financial power over someone's livelihood to keep their (potentially) good ideas from being spoken.
There should be social consequences for your speech, just not legal ones.
I explicitly agreed with that. Did you see this part?
>>That doesn't mean we should force you to keep buying from those whose ideas you don't like.
(Note: "keeping someone on your payroll" = "keep buying from them".)
>There should be social consequences for your speech, just not legal ones.
I just explained how the standard grounding for free speech doesn't distinguish between social vs legal consequences, and how the latter are only one part of the puzzle. If you dispute that logic, I'd like to hear your thinking.
Suppose a company has a disgruntled employee. The employee starts badmouthing them all over the place. Assume it doesn't rise to the level of libel or slander, but they're still causing significant problems. Is the company supposed to be required to keep employing this person or face a freedom-of-speech lawsuit? That seems absurd.
The fundamental problem here I think is the assumption that an employer is somehow "responsible" for the employee's livelihood. Employment is a simple business transaction. Neither party should be obligated to anything beyond what they agreed to at the start of the transaction. If you go buy an apple from a store, are you now responsible for that store-owner's livelihood from then on? Are you obligated to keep buying apples there and buying enough to provide the storeowner a living wage?
If someone is living so far outside their means that a temporary job loss is going to cause them ruin, that's their fault, not the company's. There's much we could do in terms of providing a better social safety net as well, but I think we're best off keeping economic transactions as purely economic as possible.
For a corporation with competition, the ability to fire someone over disagreement is clearly reasonable, since that employee may prefer work with another corporation in that sector.
To contrast: For a monopoly, the ability to fire someone over disagreement, and no other merit, is suddenly transformed into an abuse over free speech. The employee can't speak out against a monopoly, and expect to find work afterward, meaning that employee has poignant reason not to speak out in the first place.
Refusing to hire someone because they were placed on a blacklist for protected speech is wrong (and I believe, illegal). After the Damore incident there were numerous reports of people within Google openly bragging about maintaining such blacklists.
In this case you document the incidents. You establish a pattern and attempt to demonstrate intent or reckless disregard with regards to the impact of speech on the company and its business, in quantifiable terms if possible. You appeal to previously established, legally valid agreements made between the employer and the employee on what sort of speech restrictions are expected. And then when you fire the person, you tell the truth. You explain exactly why the relationship was terminated, how their exercise of free speech damages the company, and how they themselves are responsible for it.
The trick is really when it comes to actually proving that an employee is "causing significant problems" when their actions cannot actually be classified as libel, slander, or some form of harassment.
The fundamental problem here I think is the assumption that an employer is somehow "responsible" for the employee's livelihood. Employment is a simple business transaction.
No, the fundamental assumption is that any actor has a responsibility to uphold business agreements in an honest and ethical manner. This includes not using the threat of termination as leverage to suppress exercise of 1st amendment rights. That includes making reasonable attempt to respond to speech with speech before taking action, and ONLY escalating to disruptive action against the speaker when there is a clear and compelling reason to do so.
I'm all for at-will employment in principle. But the story doesn't end there. Just because you "can sometimes be justified firing someone for things they say" doesn't mean it's always the right thing to do. You have to look at each situation to make a reasonable evaluation. In this case, according to Lynn, Google applied economic pressure to (supposedly nonpartisan) New America to coerce them into into punishing Barry Lynn for praising an EU decision that hurt Google.
Lynn was not an employee of Google. Lynn was doing his job, the way he was supposed to do his job, in a principled manner which he claims is consistent with how he'd done it for the past 15 years. He and his division were employed through a 3rd party organization of which Google was simply one funder. Google, rather than responding to Lynn with a counter argument or some other speech-oriented response, instead abused their patron relationship with his employer to punish him for what he said.
Whether or not New America had "responsibility for the livelihood" of the employees is entirely beside the point. The point is to address the accusation of Google engaging in a wholly inappropriate bullying behavior. It appears they set out with intent punish someone for valid political expression using a coercive method (threatening the speaker's employer). That is the general principle at stake here. Responding to free speech with coercive action is by default unethical.
The solution will be different because the way we interact with our government is different from the way we interact with corporations.
See also: Marsh vs. Alabama. Relates more to platforms like Youtube and Twitter but is still relevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, notwithstanding the fact that the sidewalk where the distribution was taking place was part of a privately owned company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment.
As for At-Will states, you can't fire someone for any reason, because there are employment protection laws. And, as anyone who has worked in positions of authority can attest, even if you have to fire someone, you build up enough evidence so that when you are sued, you can back up your claims.
Employment at the Company is at will. The policy of at-will employment means that employment with the Company, is voluntarily entered into, and you are free to resign at will at any time, with or without notice or cause.
The policy also means that the Company may terminate your employment at will at any time, with or without notice or cause.
This right to terminate employment with or without notice or cause also applies, of course, to decisions regarding other terms of employment, including but not limited to demotion, promotion, transfer, compensation, benefits, duties, and location of work. No representative of the Company, other than one of the Principals, has the authority to enter into any agreement for employment for a specified duration or to make any agreement contrary to foregoing. Any such agreement must be by individual agreement, in writing and signed by you and one of the Principals. Accordingly, neither this manual nor any policy contained in this manual is intended to imply continued employment or otherwise limit in any way the policy of at-will employment. Nor does this manual, in describing Company policies or procedures, commit the Company, to follow any particular procedure in the course of imposing discipline, changing the terms or conditions of employment, or terminating
Yes, at anytime, and with our without reason. However, doing so can open you up to a lawsuit for wrongful termination.
You can't be fired because of sex (including orientation and pregnancy), race, religion, disability, age, or nation of origin.
Retaliation, refusal to commit a crime, and failure to follow your companies own termination process, are also grounds for wrongful termination claims.
Typically, HR departments have a firing manager start building a paper trail of evidence, usually by way of a PiP.
Also, I know further in this handbook I have, that they describe that there are procedures for "building the case" as you say but then in the same paragraph it basically says: "We don't actually have to do this".
Not to mention the whole back half of the packet deals with arbitration, which is how I assume this would be dealt w/ in court.
A fired employee doesn't have the time and probably access to the lawyers to even get this started not to mention have a hope of winning.
Hell, at this company, I came in on time, fixed three issues within my first hour, then was laid off due to "cultural fit" despite two year's of stellar performance reviews and no formal reprimands or complaints to HR.
If your company has an arbitration clause, it's usually as part of an employee agreement that specifies in-lieu of suing them, you agree to an arbitration instead.
I've turned down a job because I refused to give up my right to sue.
As to your case, just sue them and claim cultural fit was used to discriminate against you because of your race/gender/age.
Also, as a straight, white male in his 30s, I can't really be discriminated against on the grounds you state. Not to mention, I'm paying 3/4 of my unemployment to rent so don't really have the room to pay hundreds of bucks to even get in a room with a lawyer.
I recall reading over the handbook but probably not that arbitration part. That was a surprise when going back to it today. It's also something I had no idea about until the past year or so with all these stories coming out about it.
This is a call to arms by an elite to elites. Not a call for a fairer market.
Google has gotten away with treating users like products since forever. That won't change since that's how all tech and media companies thrive.
That Google is manipulating the elite behind closed doors is the problem being highlighted. Nothing substantial about how it abuses the public for its own gain.
Note too how this is being posted in Jeff Bezos's paper. This could have been a press release or some industry post, blog, but it's getting prestigious lift.
Right after the "free speech" situation at Google.
Little to NO sustained outrage over their role in the employee recruiting ban with Apple and others, depressing wages for the tech industry.
But it sure feels like today Google alone is being targeted with a wave of negative media coverage.
Note Amazon just rode into our backyards with its barely vetted purchase of Whole Foods.
EDIT big media piles on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/google-is-losing...
All states except Montana at 0.32% of the population. 99.68% of the population of the US are in at-will employment states. Most everyone is under at-will.
The negative consequence is that if you cannot have a meaningful income to survive while exercising your rights, do you have a right to begin with?
If you work for a company, and speak out against that company, there is no reason for that company to be forced to keep you. They can kick you out, and if you are fired simply over disagreement, you can find another company. The very availability of that option is how you are free to speak against your corporation. You need not stay there.
If that company is a monopoly, however, you are left without that option, and therefore left without the liberty to speak freely against that company. You can still speak out against them, and get fired like before, but then you are left with no avenue of employment afterward; and since you are thus aware, you likely won't be speaking out after all.
ES: Google is a near-monopoly. One might view your paper as criticism--criticism that I might like to silence.
BL: Oh, sh-
ES: You're fired! Also, I'll have my guys tweak the ranking algorithm a bit. Enjoy finding yourself on page 1000 of the search results for "Barry Lynn".
BL: (squeak)
ES: [impression of Agent Smith from The Matrix] What good is a phone call when you cannot... speak? Bwahahahaha!
I agree, Google has enabled far more political free speech than it has suppressed.
On the often-misunderstood idea of freedom of all speech, Google certainly has the right to suppress the speech of its employees in certain scenarios.
That has nothing to do with freedom of political speech, the storied american ideal.
In this case, this man learned a very important lesson most of us should learn much younger than him:
freedom to speak does not include freedom from repercussions
(AKA don't bite the hand that feeds if you want to be fed, real basic stuff here)
Only political speech is a protected class, and it is only protected from government intrusion, not private.
Edit: I stand corrected. "Some" forums of criticizing your employer may be considered protected. You may need a lawsuit to enforce that protection....
Only a very narrowly tailored set of criticisms related to whistleblowing, labor practices and a few other areas are protected.
What most people mean when they talk about their freedom of speech is the privilege of speaking without losing their job. I find it to be a tragic if not fatal misunderstanding pervasive to discussions about speech.
Ask. Not compel. You no longer have freedom of speech if you are forced to promote ideas you don't believe in.
My comment deals with your second sentence.
> Surely there would enough injured parties who have a reason to fund it.
You suggest that criticism is valid only if the injured have the economic power to speak. This is a dangerous way to determine validity because it forms a feedback loop where those with economic power suppress the speech of those without.
Obviously we should condemn this behavior, but I can't say I'm surprised. It's good to see such a clear example of Google being unable to resist exerting its power to protect itself from criticism, but I can't help but imagine all of the instances of this that will never see the light of day. The reality is that our world is filled with greed and corruption and that's not going to change any time soon.
Thinking about this keeps me up at night.
Coming soon: Washington Post's scathing takedown of Amazon's business model.
The action was against an organization that Google was doing business with because the arrangement no longer made sense for Google. A think tank and a newspaper are not the same thing. There is no expectation of integrity from a think tank.
The original comparison suggests Amazon is abusing influence to control the narrative at WaPo in the absence of any evidence of such abuse.
That guy is using outrage as marketing vehicle to raise funds and awareness for his (now "independent") think tank. It'll be interesting to see who's funding his work in a year or so.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-...
No doubt you can point to some Amazon PR to prove it. In reality, they're one and Bezos has done whatever he wanted till now (how many years was AMZN losing money to expand???).
You can also say "Here's an WP article slamming Amazon," but maybe the old WP would have written 5 such articles. I have no doubt that self-censorship goes on at WP just as it went with NBC /GE /Comcast and so on. They know who owns the paper and if someone has to remind them, it will be done.
Of course, you can be independent and think, but....
Interestingly enough New America also receives significant funding from Amazon, I wonder if they will get colored by the brush of politically expedient think tank funding as well.
[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/is-amazon-getting-to...
I was under the impression that funding a "Think Tank" was a way to funnel money into research, paper-writing, policy promulgation, etc. that favored your position. Are they something else?
Phrased a different way I think technically it's not a requirement to follow your investors' goals, but it's pretty much a necessity so your hands are tied.
That's right, the best I have to say about it is, it's not illegal.
The guy is publishing an article in a major news publication about his experiences during all of this. His free speech is quite obviously not being suppressed.
And he has the right to complain about being fired. End of story.
> If you don't like your employer, you can leave. That's how it works. End of story.
And go where? Another similar company, right?
While that isn't what happened in this specific situation, this guy brings up a valid point about monopolies: If you work for a company, and that company is a monopoly, you can't just leave, because you have literally nowhere else to go. Therefore that company has control over your speech without violating your constitutional rights.
That is one of many reasons we should be concerned about the centralization of power Google/Alphabet has acquired.
> The guy is publishing an article in a major news publication about his experiences during all of this. His free speech is quite obviously not being suppressed.
His speech clearly was suppressed. Just because he found a new outlet for it does not mean anything to the contrary.
Eric Schmidt didn't hire Barry Lynn. New America did.
Perhaps a better analogy: The same way I would be petty, if I fired a painter I hired, because he showed up with wearing a Colin Kaepnernick Jersey and my neighbor the police officer, who lets me borrow his lawnmower, was furious.
How many think tank papers have been quietly shredded because the author didn't have the courage Barry Lynn did?
I don't know if that's true. There are a lot of companies that would save money if healthcare was cheaper -- pretty much every company in America is a health-care consumer. It's just that benefits are diffuse and the downsides of lower-cost health care are concentrated.
Things look very different in other industries... not everyone gets the same price...
Nope.
>>not everyone gets the same price
I don't care about the price. I pay for insurance for my employees because it is the right thing to do.
The comment I am referring to is the nightmare of the setup, not the cost to me for providing the healthcare. And many middleware insurance navigators make it easy to provide it (at least for me).
As far as how much it costs me, whatever.
It's not a long term benefit because the government should be able to lower taxes given the increased revenue, but you'd never look past the short term (and the government would never lower taxes).
* There are top-tier progressive think-tanks that write favorably about single-payer; EPI is an example.
* Single-payer is ideologically anathema to conservatives and libertarians, so a majority of think tanks are going to be constitutionally incapable of proposing plans.
* For the past 8 years or so, progressives have been working to support the health care victory they already achieved in the ACA, which has been under continuous assault since the GOP regained control of the legislature. It would be weird to see them endorsing a new health care system (and, in the process, conceding defeat on the ACA).
For Libertarians (LP), maybe. There are plenty of libertarians who see initiatives like single-payer and UBI as the only way to reduce graft and overspending of the federal government, knowing that pure elimination is impossible.
https://www.google.com/search?q=libertarians+who+support+sin...
Which is what you see when you read posts from libertarians about single-payer. Single-payer as a compromise, and only if accompanied by such a radical deregulation of medicine that "single-payer" is really just an economic subsidy for consumers on a private marketplace. That's a coherent (if, to me, terrifying) plan, but it's not what mainstream policy thinkers mean by single-payer!
Again: I'm not saying a libertarian can't accept single-payer as a temporary compromise (even for very long definitions of "temporary"). But if you find single-payer attractive, you're an economic liberal.
There is a whole lot of money to be made by special interests in giving people free heathcare at the taxpayers expense. It means massively increasing government spending afterall, and that gives those with political control more resources to divvy up. And there's an enormous amount of advocacy for single payer. It also does not reduce costs.
I dont understand why Gates or Buffett who have made comments supporting single payer systems dont fund such think tanks who will "educate" the public about single payer.
IMO this is more about Barry Lynn than Google. I've known about Google for nearly 20 years. Never heard of Barry.
I don't necessarily disagree. But it is a good moment to remind everyone that those white papers have a man behind the curtain. It's also a nice cultural moment for anti-trust (admittedly my pet issue.)
>People don't tend to pay other people to tell them their baby is ugly.
Sure but if I have an ugly baby and I start funding a group called "The Baby Raters" and I watch and continue donating as they judge all of my friends babies to be ugly but then pull funding (or threaten to) when they judge my baby as ugly, I'd say that I've successfully undermined the institution. It's no longer what it says on the tin.
Schmidt joined the board in 2008. Lynn says he has been doing this research since 1999.
A healthy economy is a lot like a healthy ecosystem: some parts are weaker, some will fail when stressed, but allowing the system to react naturally to inputs will likely result in a better outcome. But when you encourage a monoculture, single stresses can result in a complete collapse[2]. We're experimenting with establishing monocultures in our economies with potentially even more impact than those of the 19th and 20th centuries (like Standard Oil) that inspired the anti-monopoly regulation and legislation: if Samsung were to shut down tomorrow, what would be the impact on the Korean, regional and world economies?
An all-powerful Google that can't accept criticism or action to "trim it back" to preserve the overall economy represents a danger and Mr. Lynn was right to point this out.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwzJlvx4ndk [2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/04/the-w...
Seems a bit of an exaggeration. Let's pretend we got word from an all-powerful being that Google and all of its services were going to disappear from the face of the earth in exactly 30 days, giving everyone including users, competitors, partners, etc. plenty of time to prepare. 30 days from now, specifically, what collapses?
That wasn't the question the post above was asking. The question wasn't "given a chance to prepare, would the economy collapse," the question was "if Google were to suddenly collapse, would our economy survive?"
There exist several single points of failure in our global economy. Given the incredible importance Google has in our economy, with search, email, collaboration software, and cloud computing, it's not a stretch to say that Google is one of those points of failure.
It's also a location of power concentration. Google basically controls the internet as most see it. If your site is removed from Google, its chance of becoming popular is almost completely removed. If you are forced off of Google and you aren't prepared, you could lose years of important information. They also track nearly everyone, opening up the possibility of corporate population control and cultural shaping.
Do we really want single corporations this powerful?
2. Every business that's running on GSuite. Let's assume this is mostly small business, and they will have limited ability to migrate to other SaaS or run in house replacements for these services.
3. Everyone who was using Youtube as a primary source of income, or whose business had a critical dependency on the Youtube platform for marketing
4. Every piece of code that depends on Google's DNS infrastructure, and anything that pulls DNS entries from 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4... how many devices like this do you think there are? How many were hard coded?
5. What happens to Android? It's a hypothetical, but potentially it could keep going, but let's assume major disruptions for everyone who runs a business that develops mobile applications for Android
6. How many people (and businesses) depend on Google Maps? How many are tied in directly to the API and won't be able to change this easily?
7. Now how many depend on Google Voice?
8. Gmail has more than 1 billion active monthly users.
I don't know if you're actually looking for a specific list of businesses, but that's not going to be possible for anyone to provide -- anyway, a shutdown of Google services would be an economic catastrophe... Most people couldn't even migrate a Gmail account in 30 days, and with Gmail alone we're already talking a billion+ people.
2. Outlook 365
3. Vimeo and Dailymotion
4. Every ISP provide DNS servers.
5. IOS
6. There are many alternative to google maps. Google didn't invented maps.
7. Noone?
8. There are many email service ready to take over.
There is nothing Google offers that can't be obtained from another provider.
And I'm not even getting into how Google has zero presence in Russia/China and its disappearance won't impact them.
Seriously though, I think you're greatly underestimating how high the switching cost is to move from one cloud provider to another.
It connected mine and my kid's school account together because same browser was used to login to those accounts.
I have come to the conclusion that Google is evil. It can't chose to not do evil anymore.
Legal as Google's demand was it seems to qualify as evil or at least unethical.
Right. Where's the scandal here? If you don't want someone or some company to have monetary power over you, then don't take money from them. I understand that it's not so simple, but at the end of the day this can't be surprising.
To wit...his prefacing comment says a lot:
No think tank wants to appear beholden to the demands of its corporate donors.
Operative word being - appear. In fact they all are beholden, of course, you just want to make sure not to appear to be.
But of course we don't have to do that. We can note the various reasons things work this way — growing monopoly power, tax laws governing nonprofits, lobbying regulations — and figure out how to change them.
Who told you they were supposed to be neutral? The only thing I expect from a think tank is reproducibility of results, if they are making claim to an objective result.
Point being, I agree it's a shame, and I would love something better, but at some point we're saying laws are written by people and interest groups, which is pretty obvious and unavoidable.
Note that when he was publishing monopoly research there was no problem, it was the decision to 'celebrate' the EU fine that seems to have got him fired.
[1] http://the1a.org/shows/2017-08-30/zillionaire-to-other-zilli...
[2] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfork...
[3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/18/to-my-fell...
Barry worked for "New America, a think tank and civic enterprise committed to renewing American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age."
He criticized Google, a significant patron of the think tank, and got fired when Eric threatened to pull funding.
This has little to do with at-will employment and much more about the impact of having most research privately funded in a capitalist environment.
There's learnings to had here though: The case of a think tank relying on very few donors is no different than a B2B startup that relies on a single enterprise company: You have a tremendous risk, the funding can disappear at any time, and for any reason. Anything other than diversification puts you at risk, and it's not really the customer's fault if you put yourself in a very weak position.
This also affects far bigger fish, like media companies and even legislators. And that's why we should have care when it comes to both media consolidation, or mechanisms where very few people can have a very big influence in the outcome of an election. But it's not as if we live in a world where the only way to have a think tank that produces policy proposals is to clear everything with Google.
A think tank is a different sort of animal. The donor is not the main entity impacted by the policy proposals the think tank produces. Just like a responsible media outlet must have a notion of journalistic integrity, or a legislator's office should feel beholden to its constituents, a think tank has a responsibility to provide sound policy advice to its readers.
You can take the position that "think tanks do not have any level of responsibility to the people who consume their policy proposals" but I certainly would not follow you there. Policy institutes present themselves as rigorously data-driven nonprofits and write with an impartial air. If criticism / negative results are known to lead directly to a loss of funding, then it is disingenuous for the think tank to present itself as impartial, and I would consider it compromised.
We tend to solve this problem with regulatory agencies that represent the impacted consumer (and not the source of revenue), though I would note that this is the very solution the author was fired for praising.
They are very much part of the regulatory capture framework in operation around power centres. It seems as easy as adopting highly deceptive orwellian sounding names and shamelessly pushing agendas while pretending to be independent.
Consumers and citizens end up paying for all this subterfuge in increased end user costs and are basically paying for organized attempts to mislead them.