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Google recently earned widespread condemnation from the media after it was learned the multinational technology company used its influence three months ago to punish an organization that had spoken out negatively about it.
According to a New York Times piece from earlier this week, a think tank that relies on Google for a large part of its funding actually ousted a key player for writing a commentary piece that took sides against the technology giant in a legal case from the European Union. The incident stirred controversy in the online world, as well as charges that Google was using its considerable wealth and power to stifle criticism of its practices.
The truth is, however, that Google may have been using its monopoly power to target critics and competitors long before June.
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Flash back to 2011, when then-Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill met with Google sales representatives to discuss their then-new social network, Plus.
“The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s ‘+1’ social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button,” she wrote this week for Gizmodo. “They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results — a crucial source of traffic to publishers.”
The salespeople specifically told her that publishers who failed to place the “+1” social buttons on their websites would see their search results suffer. Troubled by this information, she chose to write a report about it — and surprise, surprise, “Google flipped out,” she wrote.
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“I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down,” she explained. “The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.”
The story wound up being pulled from Forbes and even completely erased from Google, with even its cache image disappearing, Hill wrote.
“That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly,” Hill wrote, adding that it seems likely the company purposefully scrubbed her story from its search engine — the thought of which should frighten everyone.
“Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet,” she added, noting however that she lacks proof of this.
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To be clear, Google representatives have denied they ever scrubbed the engine of the article, though that’s somewhat hard to believe in light of the latest news about Google allegedly targeting critics and competitors.
Consider what happened to Barry Lynn, who used to run the Open Markets initiative for the New American Foundation think tank. In June, The Times wrote, he penned a piece celebrating a decision by European antitrust regulators to levy a record fine against Google.
Within hours of the piece’s publication, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, intervened by communicating “his displeasure” to the foundation’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to The Times.
This calculated move by Schmidt, who’d donated millions to the foundation and previously served as its chairman, had the desired effect: Slaughter summoned Lynn into her office and informed him that it was time for the foundation to “part ways” with his initiative.
“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington … and then pulling the strings,” Lynn told The Times. “People are so afraid of Google now.”
Literally every internet user should be concerned about charges that Google is and has been abusing its power as a corporation worth almost half a trillion dollars to silence competitors — as well as conservatives, though that’s a separate story in itself. The underlying point is that suspicions like this about Google’s behavior point to a problem — a big one, in fact, that should concern all conservatives and liberals.
Please share this story on Facebook and Twitter and let us know what you think about Google’s history of censoring its critics.
