That's one interpretation by interested parties another would be that enforcement lawyers are always aggressive and those who make the decision in the end would have to weigh the odds of winning in court and unanimously they decides not.
Regardless, the FTC would have had a much better chance than the DOJ as they have specific broad powers more suitable to this case.
Google was also very positively connected to the Obama administration. It was some googlers that stepped in and turned around healthcare.gov for instance. I've heard a lot of rumors that they gave a lot of data access to the campaigns too.
Not only is the amount of revolving door between Google and the Obama administration well documented, but Eric Schmidt was literally part of Hillary's campaign staff and personally funded a company to provide her campaign's development and infrastructure.
Suffice to say, they have a lot less allies in DC this year, and even Democrats are starting to look negatively on them now.
Although this is a minor digression, I always felt that it was very interesting to contrast the overwhelming amount of airtime on the legacy media devoted to throwing fuel on the fire of "Russian interference in the 2016 election" with the scant concern for Alphabet's working relationship with the Clinton Campaign. I know I'm not the only person concerned with the disproportionate influence that companies like Google, Twitter, etc have on modern political discourse. Isn't it frightening that the assistance of such companies can be bought with the promise of regulatory lenience? Even if someone didn't agree with the previous statement, isn't it still of significant concern that the companies controlling the flow of information are participants in partisan politics?
I don't know about data accesse rumors but the fact that a bunch of Googlers did government work during the Obama years is well documented, that said the FTC is an independent agency with commissioners from both parties and they unanimously voted against going to court.
I think you're jumping to a conclusion with that phrasing. It's very likely they happened to also volunteer (or maybe be hired by) the campaign WHILE also happening to be employed by Google.
And Google would allow their employees to build IP for a particular political campaign? That is, they would waive their rights to the IP produced by their employees for the specific benefit of a particular candidate? That seems unlikely.
And he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, not by exercising his influence at Google. By the way, we are quite far afield from the initial claim that Google employees wrote software for a particular political campaign.
> And he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, not by exercising his influence at Google. By the way, we are quite far afield from the initial claim that Google employees wrote software for a particular political campaign.
Google has been providing free services to campaigns it wants to help for over a decade, in the open. This started when Schmidt was CEO.
The Obama campaign was the first to really realize the importance of IT infrastructure, _and_ their whole shtick (more or less neoliberalism with a friendly face) aligns really well with Google's political goals.
I'm not really sure why you seem to think that this is some conspiracy theory, when everyone involved is openly talking about it.
Nothing in that article corroborates any of the claims mentioned by others above. I notice that the farther down in the thread this conversation goes, the more watered down the accusations of political meddling get. Next you’ll criticize Google for letting campaigns use Gmail or something.
Google has various programs under which employees can release code without having to care too much about the broad copyright assumptions in their contracts.
IARC should be quite suitable for projects on "contentious" topics like politics or religion: Google generally stays clear of these topics (so there won't be a conflict of interest in building something like that, as Google just isn't active in that market), and the company won't have to deal with being associated with one team (versus all the others) through some side hustle they can barely control.
(Disclosure: working at Google, but far from the licensing folks. I found them reasonable to argue with, though.)
I would find it surprising that Google would be OK with that, particularly because it could be construed as them contributing to some campaign. An employee writing a check to the campaign? That’s perfectly fine, Google has no say over that. An employee producing IP for a campaign? Well, Google does technically have a say over that and would have to waive their right of ownership of said IP...
They took leaves of absence, with the company's blessing. And Google is incorporated in California, which has strict laws that employees are allowed to develop what they like when they're not on the clock using company resources.
It's interesting people here are calling this a "conspiracy theory" when I guarantee you there are hundreds if not thousands of posters here who remember the TGIF and groups discussions where this came up.
At least admit that your initial statement was unclear at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. You made it sound like Googlers, in their capacity as employees, were working for a political campaign.
>And Google is incorporated in California, which has strict laws that employees are allowed to develop what they like when they're not on the clock using company resources.
Not really. Try to develop a search engine in your spare time and see what happens.
It's not so much an interpretation of what happened as it is a leak of what happened.
>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.
The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices, according to several people who saw the report but would speak about it only under the condition of anonymity. At least one other staff report, they said, recommended not to pursue a lawsuit. In early 2013, the agency unanimously voted not to bring charges after an investigation.
Google has already lost several antitrust actions in the EU. It's not difficult to imagine that the investigation by FTC career officials found sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to recommend taking action.
The EU has different rules (and extra motivation to go after US companies) they also don't need to win in court, their enforcement action in unilateral.
Regardless, the FTC would have had a much better chance than the DOJ as they have specific broad powers more suitable to this case.