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Bullying A Leftist Think Tank Pierces Google’s Carefully Cultivated ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Image







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…. Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of ‘imperiling the institution as a whole.’


The tech industry, and particularly its five big players—Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft—are the rising corporate titans of our era. Not only are they among the biggest companies in our economy, they are overflowing with profitability, generating enormous amounts of cash that they are able to splash around in ways that older, mature, and leaner companies can’t do.

They’re the places that build gleaming new corporate campuses like Apple’s Spaceship (the equivalent, in a previous era, of building tall downtown skyscrapers), complete with whole company towns of housing and retail (such as Facebook’s new Willow Campus), who give out generous salaries and astonishing perks to their workers, and who also are the new cash-rich sponsors for art and culture—and for think tanks. In short, they fill the role that used to be filled, in the mid-twentieth century, by old-fashioned industrial firms: automakers, oil companies, steel manufacturers, and the like. Google is the new GE.

At the same time (with the exception of Microsoft for a while back in the 1990s), these companies have escaped much of the suspicion and resentment that is usually directed at fast-growing, extremely influential, and cash-abundant corporations. Partly they have done this by seeming cool and hip and geeky-glamorous. But they have also done it by striking an implicit bargain with the political left: they back the Left on its cultural agenda, in exchange for which the Left agrees not to look too closely at these companies’ market dominance or their schemes for tax avoidance.

As one observer puts it:

If Alphabet were Monsanto or General Motors or Pfizer, most people probably wouldn’t even feign surprise. But for many years, just the word Google conferred a special halo on otherwise anodyne projects. They were the standard-bearers for the future and were afforded a generosity of intention that no other company received. But no matter the color of its logo, Alphabet’s money is green, too, and it exerts the same power as anyone else’s.

It is entirely natural for a company to not want to give money to people calling for its destruction, and I totally support that. Yet Google and many other big tech firms have also tried to present themselves as beacons of “progressive ideals.” That’s why they funded the New America Foundation, which this article refers to as a center of “market-friendly Silicon Valley progressivism.” What’s progressive about it if it’s “market-friendly”? Well, the big tech companies and the people who work for them tend to back Democratic Party candidates. They pay lip service to “progressive” policies like the basic income. And they do things like firing employees for opinions the Left deems offensive, or targeting right-leaning YouTube channels for “demonetization.”

That’s what “Silicon Valley progressivism” means: be the Left’s enforcers against heretics and infidels in the culture wars, in exchange for (temporary) dispensation for your sins against the Left in the realm of economics.

By targeting Google for prosecution under the antitrust laws—the brainchild of the original Progressives, by the way—the Open Markets team breached this unspoken bargain, and that’s why they had to go. Even if Google or Schmidt didn’t directly order the firing, the big tech companies are the new centers of overflowing corporate abundance, without which think tanks like the New America Foundation can’t thrive, so they didn’t need anyone to give anyone instructions.

It’s not just this case, or the Damore affair. Another reporter has come forward to describe how Google pressured Forbes to deep-six her exposé of Google’s aggressive negotiating tactics, for fear of having Google cut off their flow of Web traffic.

Unlike some on the Right who are willing to throw out their principles just for spite, I’m not taking sides with those who want to sic the antitrust laws on Google. I have long thought that trying to regulate technology companies under antitrust laws is absurd and destructive, ever since I defended Microsoft against claims that bundling a Web browser with an operating system would give them total power over the world. Subsequently, of course, it turned out that a search engine was way more important than a browser, and the operating system on your desktop computer didn’t matter much once everybody started using smartphones. Silicon Valley very quickly demonstrated that continued innovation is more dangerous to the power and influence of established firms than any regulator.

That should also be taken as a warning to Google that they have helped put in place forces that can profoundly undermine their own position in the market. Google still has by far the best search engine (for now). But its business model is much wider and involves billions of users letting the company become intimately involved in every detail of their lives—their Web searches, their e-mail, their online purchases, their queries to digital assistants—so Google can mine all of our lives for data.

That, too, relies on an implicit bargain: that we trust them not to abuse their position and only use our data for the relatively benign purpose of selling us stuff. For them to be seen now as a politicized organization, not just by the Right but by the Left, could end up subjecting them to a level of hostility and distrust that is incompatible with their big data business plans.

“Market-friendly Silicon Valley progressivism” may turn out to be just another unstable compromise, in which Google enforces “progressive” dictates in the culture war in order to carve out a special pro-business exception for themselves—which, if history is any guide, will be short-lived.

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