Obama & Google

Obama & Google – The Fortune Cover Story October 30, 2009
Obama is not a fan of Corporate America, but he seems to have close ties to Google, a huge corporation. Google likes to portray themselves as Washington outsiders, yet they have a 20-person policy staff in their Washington office and their fingerprints on the Obama Administration.

Obama visited Google’s HQ in 2004 and again in 2007. During the first visit he developed two economic opinions, as Fortune says “support for more U.S. educated engineers and the expansion of internet services to poor and rural areas”.

Google donated $803,000 to the Obama Presidential campaign. This was third to Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, alluded that Google might be looked at for antitrust. A Google representative says “what we offer is technological expertise…it’s a company that’s a think tank or a think tank that’s a company”.

Huh?



Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, is on Obama’s council of Science & Technology advisors. Wikipedia describes him as “an informal advisor during the Obama campaign”.

The biggest “Hmmm” is Andrew McLaughlin. He used to be Google’s head of global public policy. Now he is Deputy Chief Technology officer in the Obama Administration.

Hmmm…any chance he still has his Google stock options?

Can anyone guess how old Google is? A mere 11 years old! Google is mostly a search engine but it is branching out into new fields. It wants to have a digital library, for example. However, it still holds 65% of the search market in the United States. Take that, Bing!

But – how much does Google know about you? Most of us use Google for search. Many of us have a Gmail account. Fortune describes the big brother situation of writing an email within a Gmail account to a friend about skiing, and having ads of ski resorts appear in the margins. That’s creepy, in my opinion.

Just how much do they know? Is it time for an antitrust investigation?

Google maintains that it is looking out for the little guy. It says that it is a “resource for technology issues in Washington”. What does Google want from Washington? Probably they want the government to stay off their case. But in addition to that, they want “net neutrality”. What is “net neutrality”?

Large phone companies such as AT&T, Verizon and cable companies own large networks. Because they own the networks, presumably they have some modicum of control as to what runs on the networks. An presumably, because they have invested so much to build and maintain the networks, they want to make a profit off of the network.

But Google wants to make sure that the network operators are not allowed to affect or control the content on their networks. This sounds like a good thing to me too – let’s support them here.
Did you know how much information your big brother Google has on you? Every time you send an email from a Gmail account that belongs to Google. According to Fortune there is a federal law which allows law enforcement (the guys in blue) to acquire email messages less than 181 days old. Yipes. Let’s keep Google happy – but don’t you think the Obama administration wants to keep Google happy? Don’t forget Google was their #3 corporate donor.

Hmmm….stay tuned for the soap opera.

Now that I’ve covered the Fortune article, I’ll give you my own take. I think we’ll be hearing about Google for the next few years, we may even see some antitrust action, and then it will all fade away. I’m old enough to remember the antitrust action against Microsoft, and before that, IBM. And how about AT&T/ Remember the Baby Bells?

Will the Obama administration be accused by anyone other than Fortune for being too close to Google? It is interesting, given the Obama administration’s anti-corporate stance, how deeply they’re enmeshed with Google.

Stay tuned, folks. I think we haven’t heard the last of this.