Good day all. Since Google, or as it is now known, Goolag, fired one of their employees for criticizing Goolag’s politically correct employment practices, more and more news, all of it bad from the Goolag point of view, has been coming out.
The most recent assault on freedom by Goolag was the ousting from a think tank a man who made the mistake of criticizing Goolag. Here are the details from the New York Slimes:
In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a wealthy tech giant is criticized.
The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left and helped Google shape those debates.
But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
I suspect Schmidt’s displeasure took the form of, “We are not amused. Remove the offending remarks and exile that wrong thinking peon immediately!”
The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.
Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive chairman.
Not just liberal groups, but a large political cross section are starting to see just how powerful these tech giants have become, and, at least for conservative groups, how quickly companies like Goolag will censor them.
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.
While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”
In other words, Mr. Lynn’s wrongthink remarks offended His Majesty, and the only solution was the virtual summery execution of Lynn and his staff.
Mr. Lynn, in an interview, charged that Ms. Slaughter caved to pressure from Mr. Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.
“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”
And this is why the antitrust laws were passed. Goolag and the other tech companies are now reaching the point of controlling communications in the United States and also the rest of the world. Goolag, of course, doesn’t see it that way.
Google rejected any suggestion that it played a role in New America’s split with Open Markets.
Riva Sciuto, a Google spokeswoman, pointed out that the company supports a wide range of think tanks and other nonprofits focused on information access and internet regulation. “We don’t agree with every group 100 percent of the time, and while we sometimes respectfully disagree, we respect each group’s independence, personnel decisions and policy perspectives.”
One of the items people are starting to become aware of, is just how much Goolag is spending to, for lack of a better term, bribe congress and regulators to leave them alone.
Among the most effective — if little examined — tools in Google’s public policy toolbox has been its funding of nonprofit groups from across the political spectrum. This year, it has donated to 170 such groups, according to Google’s voluntary disclosures on its website.
That’s a lot of moola being laundered and handed out to those who can make life a bit difficult for Goolag.
Some tech lobbyists, think tank officials and scholars argue that the efforts help explain why Google has mostly avoided damaging regulatory and enforcement decisions in the United States of the sort levied by the European Union in late June.
The European Union’s decisions, to be blunt, are nothing less then an attempt to loot Goolag. The Brussels Bureaucrats running the European Union are, for the most part, communists and totalitarians who despise the free enterprise system and anyone who’s been successful. However, Goolag’s problems in the United States are a little bit different.
But Google’s Washington alliances could be tested in the coming months. Google emerged as a flash point in the latest skirmish of the culture wars this month after one of its male engineers posted a critique of the company’s efforts to diversify. And its data collection continues fueling questions about its commitment to privacy.
It’s not just Goolag that has a problem when it comes to hoovering up people’s information. Facebook is another one that has been found to abuse it’s “power” and has been caught actively censoring anyone who doesn’t toe the Progressive “Zuckerberg is GOD!” line.
Then we have the cable companies that have been merging for the last 8+ years with a concurrent degradation in service. Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon have been centralizing for quite a while now and, in my opinion, reached the point where we need to start looking at breaking them up…again.
“There are simply fewer groups that are available to speak up about Google’s activities that threaten online privacy,” Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said. “The groups that should be speaking up aren’t.”
Well, the “Groups who should be speaking but have been bought off” may not be, but a lot of very angry individuals are starting to. People are beginning to notice that their choices are being diminished, and that their ability to speak their minds is being actively suppressed. You just need to see what happens to the noted author, Michael Z. Williamson on Facebook, or, as he refers to it, “Fecesbook.” His account is constantly being suspended, to the point that he’s had to set up alternatives.
I’m not sure how to break up Goolag or Faceplant, but I do know one way to deal with Comcrap. In Comcrap’s case, the easiest way is to split the company in two. One side handles the actual physical plant, (Cables, networking equipment and other infrastructure), and the other would be the content side of the house.
Comcrap infrastructure company can handle the transmission of content as well as internet access, and they can sell bandwidth to any other content company. The content side of things can buy bandwidth from the infrastructure company and compete with other content companies for customers. This regulatory tool could be used on most of the other massive telecom companies. I think it’s time for the DoJ to start looking into breaking things up again. The last time they did this was back when AT&T, also known as “Ma Bell” was broken up. Will this happen? I don’t know, but with the current crop of crooks in Congress, I doubt it.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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