There are plenty of instances where someone may want to avoid regulation for purely legitimate reasons. Regulation is an added cost. Sometimes that cost is justified, sometimes it's not. But whether or not it is justified, the cost is present. So, it is perfectly possible and reasonable for a company to want to avoid being regulated without having malicious intent.
> If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
let's apply your "rebuttal" to that then, too:
He means like smuggling food to political prisoners in an oppressive regime? Like hiding Jews in Nazi Germany? An abused child writing a letter to the police? Or even just a desperate prisoner writing a secret diary to hang on to their sanity or memories?
What a bunch of monsters. [super dramatic pause]
Even if you restricted it to wanting "literally nobody" to know (which is nonsense, especially in the context of online communications, so that's just some sophistry on Schmidt's behalf to be corrected by the reader), there's plenty examples to be found.
Compared to all that, bleh to a search engine. Yeah they're useful, but if I had to pick between either using only search, or only word of mouth, link lists and bookmarks, and having the comparison, I'd use the latter.
There is no such substitute for privacy. I would even say your "right" to their services doesn't outweigh the actual rights of others and yourself to liberty and dignity. I'm not saying they necessarily clash, but insofar they do, those are the priorities. Wildly popular, schmildly schmopular. If what some people like is such a great measurement, why are they liking such bad things?
Using government power to forcefully break up a publicly owned company is such a barbaric way of doing things.
Here are some better suggestions:
1. Force government institutions to use alternative search engines
2. Have government institutions nominate a "search engine of the month" and all their employees must use that
3. Subsidize search engine research in the public domain
4. Determine if any search engine patents are blocking innovation, and invalidate those patents
5. Subsidize research into decentralized search engines
Companies operate in our society, and they impact the citizens of our society. It is reasonable to directly stop a company when it is working against the shared values of our society.
Really, I would argue that it is barbaric to force a society to live with a company which ignores the wider interests of society.
Silly use of persuasive words on the part of the OP. Barbarians don't have corporations nor anti-trust regulation. All of the "market forces" remedies that the OP suggest are just the sort of thing that monopoly power makes ineffective. If Google is a utility like the phone system circa 1970, then the solutions suggested are analogous to addressing AT&T's monopoly by forcing government employees to use ham radios one week and carrier pigeons the next. Monopoly power means that consumer choice has been reduced to the choice to take it or leave it and all the suggestions are simply that; take it or leave it.
If my bag of potato chips is demonstrably and deliberately harming the lives of many real live people, you are welcome to crush it.
(Not that all corporations harm people. But some combination of "the way we tend to structure them" and "human behavior in large groups" seems to make them a lot more cavalier about collateral harm and negative externalities, particularly as they get big.)
A few of those suggestions seem a lot more "barbaric" than the government enforcing anti-monopoly laws. Imagine administrators, researchers, or whomever else works for the government having to change up their entire work routines and use a search engine they may ethically oppose because the government is trying to force fairmindedness. And the government should pick and choose patents to invalidate because the inventions described are too popular?
Well, poor them. Regulatory risk is just one of the risks of investing. Yes, it sucks that some of them are going to be the retirees of the world, but again, that applies generally to all investing. When you're making public policy, you have to put the individual aside and focus on the macro impact.
Now imagine all the value and money-making opportunity created for those investors by having a healthy and active competitive marketplace.
Funding research into search is good but the other options are impractical.
If 4 is doable, it would take many years and involve many lawyers and potentially wind up achieving nothing.
1 and 2 involve directly interfering in the operations of other organisations in order to erode 0.000001% of Google's business. How would you enforce this anyway?
This isn't about the lack of competition on the search engine market as it is about a single entity holding as much financial and political power to undermine every single one of your suggestions with ease.
I really don't understand why Google should fund this research. It's really not in their best interests.
Why can't the Open Markets team just find new funders? With this type of publicity, I'm sure many corporations and even individuals would step up.
I think the bigger problem is that the Open Market's team miscalculated that the New America foundation would have the flexibility and/or courage to stand behind this project vs stand up to Google.
It just seems a bit entitled to ask Google to fund research that can hurt them as a company.
> I really don't understand why Google should fund this research.
No. They didn't directly fund any research. Google funds the New America think thank, which houses a group that researches about monopolies. However, it seems that the problem started when one of the researchers wrote a press release celebrating a major antitrust loss for Google on Europe.
Let Open Markets find another think-tank to get funding from.
Remember kids, think-tanks are where corporations go to produce research reports supporting their position. They're not independent academic institutions.
I think the idea that Google would be opposed to this idea is in direct conflict with Google's past public image.
That they are deciding that this is not the type of research that they wanted to fund is pretty clear step into the "evil" category of common corporate that they in the past have been admired for avoiding.
This isn't news to me but it's probably news for a lot of people.
Nonsense. Google, like any company or individual can choose to not fund any group that would be detrimental to them, or for any other reason. Suggesting it's evil not to fund a group that is targeting them is laughable.
Almost any company is going to do the same thing. I'm certainly not going to donate to a group that openly tells people I'm an asshole, regardless of the truth of it.
You're conflating New America with Open Markets. Google is one of New America's funders, and Open Markets is a group inside New America. Google is using it's funds to influence New America's behavior.
Do you think it's ethical for a company funding a news agency to influence what they publish? The same would logically go for research. Google should be free to chose to fund or not fund New America, but they should not be able to use that funding for influence. That's unethical.
Furthermore there definitely is an argument for Google's behavior being unethical regardless. Acting in your self-interest is not unconditionally ethical. By analogy: a person absolutely has a personal responsibility to inform others if they are dangerous. It would be unethical to hide the fact that I'm not a safe driver, or that I'm prone to psychotic rages. Google is not ethically excused if their monopoly is deleterious to the public good just because saying it would affect their bottom line.
"Do you think it's ethical for a company funding a news agency to influence what they publish?"
Every news agency's owners and advertisers influence what they publish. The argument from ethics is an interesting one. I know many advertisers who pull their funding from a show whose host said something controversial. They make the network fire the host and cancel a show etc.
Just because something is controversial doesn't mean it's journalistically valuable. For instance if a host does something that the company considers unethical (eg a controversial statement that may or may not be true but is definitely damaging), they have an ethical responsibility to pull their business, even if it's actually against their own self interest. If you instead consider truth to be more important, then companies are also justified in pulling their business if they think the controversial statement is obviously false.
The unethical part of what google is doing is that there is very little chance they are not acting entirely in their own self-interest. There is an entire additional stratum of arguments underneath that which are about the real truth, freedom of speech, and whether it is okay to block what people think based on your opinions.
"May or may not be true, but definitely damaging" sounds like what these guys were publishing.
Lots of opinions are damaging to someone or someone's agenda if taken seriously by enough people.
Do you really think these other corporate sponsors don't think about what's good for them and their image when they pull funding? You have to compare apples to apples. Google should be compared to other corporate sponsors of projects.
But New America isn't a news agency. It's a public policy think tank. So it isn't at all unethical for Google to stop funding a think tank if it disagrees with it's research.
It's not unethical to not donate. It's unethical to direct their research. They're an independent entity.
Even more important than that though is that think tanks are supposed to produce objective truth through rational arguments. It is unethical to interfere with objective truth. Google can argue the subjective validity of what New America produces, but they can't just block things they don't agree with. By influencing New America to avoid statements condemning Google, that's what they are doing.
I'll admit it's a fine line between withdrawing funding and using it as a threat to influence a think tank, but I think the difference is obvious.
Corporations often invest in public policy groups that further their own goals. Once they realize the funding is antithetical to the corporate goals, it's in the company's best interest to defund it.
The onus here to protect the Open Markets work, IMO, isn't on Google. It should be on the New America foundation. They had 2 choices: 1, Tell Google goodbye and raise money elsewhere while keeping to fund the Open Market initiative. Or 2, Keep Google's funding while defunding and disbanding the Open Markets team.
The ire, I believe, should be directed at the New America foundation and their leadership. Google seemed to just protect their best interests.
1) Doesn't it seem weird that Google funded New America for years while the Open Markets group posted about other tech companies like Amazon and Uber? They had to know there was an anti-trust group there.
2) They didn't pull funding, they threatened to pull it. I might understand if they had pulled it, instead they leaned on New America, through board chair Eric Schmidt, in whatever the implicit version of quid pro quo is. I think that's part of what's upsetting people here.
Why did New America let themselves get into the position where a single customer provides most of their business? (Many companies are in this position, which makes it seem unavoidable. So then, where is the savings or insurance to offset the burn rate until a new whale can be found? In personal finance, we're told to keep 6 months of income in reserve, but that's considered wasteful for businesses. So then they just accept this seemingly-unavoidable risk.)
Assuming the product they produce is public sentiment, where is their quality control, to prevent possibly financially-damaging products from being released?
If they were an advertising firm contracted by Google, where Google is providing 80% of their revenue, and they ran an anti-Google ad campaign (let's say Apple commissioned it and then blamed Microsoft), would we feel as bad when Google ended the contract?
Getting really sick of this story. Open Markets really comes across sleazy when you read the emails published by New America. [1] Slaughter's second statement, via Medium, is also worth reading. [2] Combined with the fact that Open Markets has been publishing anti-Google stuff for years while Google funded New America, Barry Lynn's side of the story make no sense at all.
Honestly, if you read some Barry Lynn and Matt Stoler and other people in that Open Markets crew... it's like 90% empty and loud rhetoric and maybe 10% cogent argumentation. It feels like a big circular link fest, takes so long to find something meaty. So much smoke and mirrors and equivocation on key terms... like, for example, "monopoly".
I'm not saying there aren't good questions to raise about Google's power, Google's anti-competitive practices or Google's link to research.
But the tone and quality of this public surge of the conversation driven by the Open Market 'scandal' seems highly manufactured and low quality. I can only assume some larger forces are throwing a ton of money in as well. But I guess that's how policy and economic talk tends to go when it hits the mainstream.
Edit: have to admit it's also riling me up that the pretty-far-left progressives like Stoller are happily now joining up with Tucker Carlson and that ilk, who raking Google over the coals for the James Damore memo fallout. Stoller was on Tucker's show yesterday. High fives.
> Getting really sick of this story. Open Markets really comes across sleazy when you read the emails published by New America. [1] Slaughter's second statement, via Medium, is also worth reading. [2] Combined with the fact that Open Markets has been publishing anti-Google stuff for years while Google funded New America, Barry Lynn's side of the story make no sense at all.
As far as I can tell, though, Slaughter doesn't contradict any of the facts laid out by Lynn.
Also, I find this passage from [2] troubling:
> On the contrary, Barry’s new organization and campaign against Google is the opening salvo of one group of Democrats versus another group of Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 election, at a time when I personally think the country faces far greater challenges of racism, violence, a broken political system, and geographic and partisan divisions so great that we are losing any common sense of what we stand and strive for as a country.
Should we not pay attention to problems related to the growing power of large corporations and monopolies just because the US has other significant issues?
We're only supposed to pay attention to the growing power of large corporations and monopolies that fund the opposition party. You're not supposed to question the companies your own money comes from! /s
I've been following this closely, and having read everything Slaughter writes, I don't see how you can come down so hard against open markets- They exaggerated what happened but the essential facts are never disputed- even in Slaughter's most recent post.
1) Open Markets didn't let Slaughter know they were publishing work critical of Google.
2) Slaughter had to rush to explain the work to Google.
3) Schmidt expressed his displeasure. But didn't directly request anyone be fired
4) Slaughter told Open Markets they had to part ways, and mentioned how OM could make it harder for all of NA to get funding.
Thats the essence of the story, and no one is disputing it, and it strongly indicates New America is heavily influenced by their corporate sponsors.
Where were the exaggerations:
Barry didn't mention that he had aggreed to allow Slaughter to preview work and show it to google before he published. Also, Slaughter didn't outright fire anyone at OM. HOWEVER, Slaughter is bending the truth to imply that Google/Schmidt didn't influence her decision to remove open markets, when the entire scope of problems she has with Barry and OM come from the tension between Google and OM, and Google's desire to see what OM will publish before it becomes public. She writes a lot about how what OM says is false without EVER addressing the core issue! Instead, she tries to get around it by leaning on the fact that she was not commanded to do anything by Google.
Slaughter's July 7 email (3rd one on the page) to Lynn says "telling me one thing and doing another was just the last instance of a pattern of behavior that has been troubling to myself and your colleagues for over a year"
In multiple places, she indicates he's been difficult to work with and insubordinate. Probably understandable that a federated institution like New America, with multuple parallel units working on different interests, doesn't want the bullshit a person like that brings into the mix.
As her statement says, they tried to part amicably and leaving Open Markets intact and independent. Looks like Open Markets went for the publicity grab. Doesn't make me a fan.
Thanks for letting me bounce my thoughts off you, and it's good to get the confirmation that there is no disagreement about the fundamentals of what happened.
It's obvious Slaughter strangled the group. She joined four years ago, three years in his group is being forced to spin out because they won't communicate. So from the emails it seems to me that they need to notify Slaughter everytime the publish something for a sponsor and then there is probably some level of pushback levied when this happens. Well New America has Google and Comcast and AT&T and Microsoft and Facebook as sponsors along with about a hundred others. Realistically, the new boss, Slaughter, just wasn't able or willing to stand up to corporate pressure in order to allow Open Markets to do it's job. Lynn was put into a no-win situation as anyone who's ever had a boss who won't fight for you can tell you.
And this excellent article in the Yale Law Journal from Open Market's Lina Khan is a discussion on Amazon but is quite detailed and is probably the best argument the Open Markets program has put forward to date:
You could also look into Barak Orbach, he's a legal scholar and his website has links to a lot of his articles on antitrust law. The modern anti-monopoly movement is really built around the idea that the courts made a mistake when they bought Robert Bork's (and others) argument that monopoly effects should be judged solely on price effects (obviously a big simplification.) Check out the links!
So, I am supportive of Open Markets' goals and all, but "Tell Google: Stop Killing Monopoly Research" seems... mistargeted? If Google is the problem, we shouldn't be trying to tell Google to do something not in their own interests, we should be telling others, like regulators, to do something about Google.
"Tell Google" is directing your complaint at the wrong party.
I very briefly glanced under the technical covers of this campaign. For the curious, citizensagainstmonopoly.org was created 2017-08-10T18:56:36Z. The site was apparently written by middleseat.co - "Middle Seat is a digital marketing, media and organizing firm advocating for progressive candidates and causes." Its principals are the former Bernie Sanders digital and social media directors and advisor (Zack Exley, frm Wikimedia Foundation).
Microsoft has a long history of funding, encouraging, and astroturfing opposition to Google. One easy approach to discouraging this behavior is to make sure Microsoft is mentioned whenever a Google "evil monopoly" campaign goes by. Especially if it mentions Facebook and Amazon as well, but leaves out Microsoft. So I mention it in passing here, mostly to illustrate the approach. I know of nothing connecting Microsoft with the current campaign.
> Microsoft has a long history of funding, encouraging, and astroturfing opposition to Google.
What exactly have they done to this effect? The closest I can think of is Scroogled [1], which was pretty transparently a Microsoft marketing campaign. I would hardly characterize it as "astroturfing".
I am all for the little guy fighting the big guy...but this isn't it, this is the antithesis of it.
What this is amounts to: You were getting millions of dollars from Google and only now that the money is gone you conveniently you have a bone to pick. If you really believed Google was evil as your website claims you wouldn't have been taking Google money until the day it was revoked.
How long does this group need to perform research into Google's anti-competitive behavior and how much money do they need? It seems all you need to do is try to compete or happen to be a market leader where google decides to compete and you have all the evidence you need.
Internet search market share = x%
using that dominance and information on search terms and advertising dollars to determine what market to compete in next in how many occasions= x
advertising costs increased when google began competing = x%
# of companies that were advertising on google that shut down once google began competing = x
What are the actual goals and what are the actual methods to achieve these goals other than asking for money to replace Google's money to conduct research?
I have been talking about it for some time, it starts with empowering people, show people they can take on google and win. Start small, give the people a road map and execute. Try a google search boycott, inform the public when the boycott begins, inform the public how to set their devices/computers to a google competitor, and create your list of demands. My recommendation start small, but meaningful, give an achievable goal that is understandable to the public and sets the stage for the public to wake up and accept the facts that they wield all the power but also impacts googles pocket. Create a clear cut economic line in the sand, you are either on your side or on you are in Google's pocket, you pick. In short, highlight their tax avoidance scheme in Ireland, they are headquartered in the US right? But they claim to be headquartered in Ireland to avoid paying taxes in they very country they benefit from...boycott their search engine until they stop playing the tax game, make them sign a pledge or even contract agreeing to pay the US corporate tax, including, all back taxes. Is that fair to Google? Are they alone? Most assuredly not, but its not about Google, its about tearing back the veil on the perceived power struggle, does Google owe the people or do people owe Google?
62 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] thread>If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place
-Eric Schmidt
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/
What a bunch of monsters.
> If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
let's apply your "rebuttal" to that then, too:
He means like smuggling food to political prisoners in an oppressive regime? Like hiding Jews in Nazi Germany? An abused child writing a letter to the police? Or even just a desperate prisoner writing a secret diary to hang on to their sanity or memories?
What a bunch of monsters. [super dramatic pause]
Even if you restricted it to wanting "literally nobody" to know (which is nonsense, especially in the context of online communications, so that's just some sophistry on Schmidt's behalf to be corrected by the reader), there's plenty examples to be found.
Compared to all that, bleh to a search engine. Yeah they're useful, but if I had to pick between either using only search, or only word of mouth, link lists and bookmarks, and having the comparison, I'd use the latter.
There is no such substitute for privacy. I would even say your "right" to their services doesn't outweigh the actual rights of others and yourself to liberty and dignity. I'm not saying they necessarily clash, but insofar they do, those are the priorities. Wildly popular, schmildly schmopular. If what some people like is such a great measurement, why are they liking such bad things?
Here are some better suggestions: 1. Force government institutions to use alternative search engines 2. Have government institutions nominate a "search engine of the month" and all their employees must use that 3. Subsidize search engine research in the public domain 4. Determine if any search engine patents are blocking innovation, and invalidate those patents 5. Subsidize research into decentralized search engines
Companies operate in our society, and they impact the citizens of our society. It is reasonable to directly stop a company when it is working against the shared values of our society.
Really, I would argue that it is barbaric to force a society to live with a company which ignores the wider interests of society.
Can I reach into your backpack and crush your bag of potato chips?
What's the matter; all the baked potato material is still there!
(Not that all corporations harm people. But some combination of "the way we tend to structure them" and "human behavior in large groups" seems to make them a lot more cavalier about collateral harm and negative externalities, particularly as they get big.)
Imagine how much money flows out of investors' pockets and into the pockets of government insiders and lawyers during a big antitrust lawsuit..
Now imagine all the value and money-making opportunity created for those investors by having a healthy and active competitive marketplace.
If 4 is doable, it would take many years and involve many lawyers and potentially wind up achieving nothing.
1 and 2 involve directly interfering in the operations of other organisations in order to erode 0.000001% of Google's business. How would you enforce this anyway?
Why can't the Open Markets team just find new funders? With this type of publicity, I'm sure many corporations and even individuals would step up.
I think the bigger problem is that the Open Market's team miscalculated that the New America foundation would have the flexibility and/or courage to stand behind this project vs stand up to Google.
It just seems a bit entitled to ask Google to fund research that can hurt them as a company.
Perhaps it's more important to control institutions and the conversation.
No. They didn't directly fund any research. Google funds the New America think thank, which houses a group that researches about monopolies. However, it seems that the problem started when one of the researchers wrote a press release celebrating a major antitrust loss for Google on Europe.
This is why Google isn't going to fund this.
Let Open Markets find another think-tank to get funding from.
Remember kids, think-tanks are where corporations go to produce research reports supporting their position. They're not independent academic institutions.
That they are deciding that this is not the type of research that they wanted to fund is pretty clear step into the "evil" category of common corporate that they in the past have been admired for avoiding.
This isn't news to me but it's probably news for a lot of people.
Do you think it's ethical for a company funding a news agency to influence what they publish? The same would logically go for research. Google should be free to chose to fund or not fund New America, but they should not be able to use that funding for influence. That's unethical.
Furthermore there definitely is an argument for Google's behavior being unethical regardless. Acting in your self-interest is not unconditionally ethical. By analogy: a person absolutely has a personal responsibility to inform others if they are dangerous. It would be unethical to hide the fact that I'm not a safe driver, or that I'm prone to psychotic rages. Google is not ethically excused if their monopoly is deleterious to the public good just because saying it would affect their bottom line.
Every news agency's owners and advertisers influence what they publish. The argument from ethics is an interesting one. I know many advertisers who pull their funding from a show whose host said something controversial. They make the network fire the host and cancel a show etc.
That answers whether they think it's ethical. However, they weren't asked.
The unethical part of what google is doing is that there is very little chance they are not acting entirely in their own self-interest. There is an entire additional stratum of arguments underneath that which are about the real truth, freedom of speech, and whether it is okay to block what people think based on your opinions.
Lots of opinions are damaging to someone or someone's agenda if taken seriously by enough people.
Do you really think these other corporate sponsors don't think about what's good for them and their image when they pull funding? You have to compare apples to apples. Google should be compared to other corporate sponsors of projects.
Even more important than that though is that think tanks are supposed to produce objective truth through rational arguments. It is unethical to interfere with objective truth. Google can argue the subjective validity of what New America produces, but they can't just block things they don't agree with. By influencing New America to avoid statements condemning Google, that's what they are doing.
I'll admit it's a fine line between withdrawing funding and using it as a threat to influence a think tank, but I think the difference is obvious.
The onus here to protect the Open Markets work, IMO, isn't on Google. It should be on the New America foundation. They had 2 choices: 1, Tell Google goodbye and raise money elsewhere while keeping to fund the Open Market initiative. Or 2, Keep Google's funding while defunding and disbanding the Open Markets team.
The ire, I believe, should be directed at the New America foundation and their leadership. Google seemed to just protect their best interests.
2) They didn't pull funding, they threatened to pull it. I might understand if they had pulled it, instead they leaned on New America, through board chair Eric Schmidt, in whatever the implicit version of quid pro quo is. I think that's part of what's upsetting people here.
Not that New America is blameless obviously.
Assuming the product they produce is public sentiment, where is their quality control, to prevent possibly financially-damaging products from being released?
If they were an advertising firm contracted by Google, where Google is providing 80% of their revenue, and they ran an anti-Google ad campaign (let's say Apple commissioned it and then blamed Microsoft), would we feel as bad when Google ended the contract?
Meh.
Find a hand to feed you that's not the one you're currently trying to bite. There are plenty out there, you'll be fine.
They're a natural analogy for the way a monopoly's reach impacts different areas of life.
http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/48508d5f59aa4bcaa900cb7da0d1c29f/p...
Honestly, if you read some Barry Lynn and Matt Stoler and other people in that Open Markets crew... it's like 90% empty and loud rhetoric and maybe 10% cogent argumentation. It feels like a big circular link fest, takes so long to find something meaty. So much smoke and mirrors and equivocation on key terms... like, for example, "monopoly".
I'm not saying there aren't good questions to raise about Google's power, Google's anti-competitive practices or Google's link to research.
But the tone and quality of this public surge of the conversation driven by the Open Market 'scandal' seems highly manufactured and low quality. I can only assume some larger forces are throwing a ton of money in as well. But I guess that's how policy and economic talk tends to go when it hits the mainstream.
Edit: have to admit it's also riling me up that the pretty-far-left progressives like Stoller are happily now joining up with Tucker Carlson and that ilk, who raking Google over the coals for the James Damore memo fallout. Stoller was on Tucker's show yesterday. High fives.
[1] https://www.newamerica.org/new-america/press-releases/intere...
[2] https://medium.com/@slaughteram/when-the-truth-is-messy-and-...
As far as I can tell, though, Slaughter doesn't contradict any of the facts laid out by Lynn.
Also, I find this passage from [2] troubling:
> On the contrary, Barry’s new organization and campaign against Google is the opening salvo of one group of Democrats versus another group of Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 election, at a time when I personally think the country faces far greater challenges of racism, violence, a broken political system, and geographic and partisan divisions so great that we are losing any common sense of what we stand and strive for as a country.
Should we not pay attention to problems related to the growing power of large corporations and monopolies just because the US has other significant issues?
1) Open Markets didn't let Slaughter know they were publishing work critical of Google.
2) Slaughter had to rush to explain the work to Google.
3) Schmidt expressed his displeasure. But didn't directly request anyone be fired
4) Slaughter told Open Markets they had to part ways, and mentioned how OM could make it harder for all of NA to get funding.
Thats the essence of the story, and no one is disputing it, and it strongly indicates New America is heavily influenced by their corporate sponsors.
Where were the exaggerations:
Barry didn't mention that he had aggreed to allow Slaughter to preview work and show it to google before he published. Also, Slaughter didn't outright fire anyone at OM. HOWEVER, Slaughter is bending the truth to imply that Google/Schmidt didn't influence her decision to remove open markets, when the entire scope of problems she has with Barry and OM come from the tension between Google and OM, and Google's desire to see what OM will publish before it becomes public. She writes a lot about how what OM says is false without EVER addressing the core issue! Instead, she tries to get around it by leaning on the fact that she was not commanded to do anything by Google.
In multiple places, she indicates he's been difficult to work with and insubordinate. Probably understandable that a federated institution like New America, with multuple parallel units working on different interests, doesn't want the bullshit a person like that brings into the mix.
As her statement says, they tried to part amicably and leaving Open Markets intact and independent. Looks like Open Markets went for the publicity grab. Doesn't make me a fan.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNoVefpaPtVOsGyQnpNQR...
And this excellent article in the Yale Law Journal from Open Market's Lina Khan is a discussion on Amazon but is quite detailed and is probably the best argument the Open Markets program has put forward to date:
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
You could also look into Barak Orbach, he's a legal scholar and his website has links to a lot of his articles on antitrust law. The modern anti-monopoly movement is really built around the idea that the courts made a mistake when they bought Robert Bork's (and others) argument that monopoly effects should be judged solely on price effects (obviously a big simplification.) Check out the links!
"Tell Google" is directing your complaint at the wrong party.
I very briefly glanced under the technical covers of this campaign. For the curious, citizensagainstmonopoly.org was created 2017-08-10T18:56:36Z. The site was apparently written by middleseat.co - "Middle Seat is a digital marketing, media and organizing firm advocating for progressive candidates and causes." Its principals are the former Bernie Sanders digital and social media directors and advisor (Zack Exley, frm Wikimedia Foundation).
Microsoft has a long history of funding, encouraging, and astroturfing opposition to Google. One easy approach to discouraging this behavior is to make sure Microsoft is mentioned whenever a Google "evil monopoly" campaign goes by. Especially if it mentions Facebook and Amazon as well, but leaves out Microsoft. So I mention it in passing here, mostly to illustrate the approach. I know of nothing connecting Microsoft with the current campaign.
FWIW.
What exactly have they done to this effect? The closest I can think of is Scroogled [1], which was pretty transparently a Microsoft marketing campaign. I would hardly characterize it as "astroturfing".
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130207164132/http://www.scroog...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2365060/microsoft-caught-astr...
Confirmed: Ben Edelman Paid by Microsoft, Attacks Google
http://techrights.org/2011/08/30/ben-edelman-works-for-monop...
Astroturfing Antitrust: How Microsoft is Crafting the Grassroots Case Against Google
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/astroturfing-antitrust-how-micr...
Who’s Behind This Shadow Group Attacking Google?
http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/google-transparency-project/
What this is amounts to: You were getting millions of dollars from Google and only now that the money is gone you conveniently you have a bone to pick. If you really believed Google was evil as your website claims you wouldn't have been taking Google money until the day it was revoked.
How long does this group need to perform research into Google's anti-competitive behavior and how much money do they need? It seems all you need to do is try to compete or happen to be a market leader where google decides to compete and you have all the evidence you need.
Internet search market share = x%
using that dominance and information on search terms and advertising dollars to determine what market to compete in next in how many occasions= x
advertising costs increased when google began competing = x%
# of companies that were advertising on google that shut down once google began competing = x
What are the actual goals and what are the actual methods to achieve these goals other than asking for money to replace Google's money to conduct research?
I have been talking about it for some time, it starts with empowering people, show people they can take on google and win. Start small, give the people a road map and execute. Try a google search boycott, inform the public when the boycott begins, inform the public how to set their devices/computers to a google competitor, and create your list of demands. My recommendation start small, but meaningful, give an achievable goal that is understandable to the public and sets the stage for the public to wake up and accept the facts that they wield all the power but also impacts googles pocket. Create a clear cut economic line in the sand, you are either on your side or on you are in Google's pocket, you pick. In short, highlight their tax avoidance scheme in Ireland, they are headquartered in the US right? But they claim to be headquartered in Ireland to avoid paying taxes in they very country they benefit from...boycott their search engine until they stop playing the tax game, make them sign a pledge or even contract agreeing to pay the US corporate tax, including, all back taxes. Is that fair to Google? Are they alone? Most assuredly not, but its not about Google, its about tearing back the veil on the perceived power struggle, does Google owe the people or do people owe Google?
I might be wrong, but this doesn't sound like research to me...