Google funded far-right antiregulation groups and absorbed privacy advocates amid antitrust scrutiny

Evidence

The FTC antitrust investigation appears to have heightened Google’s fears of a regulatory threat to surveillance capitalism. That year, Google’s grant-making operation aimed at civil society organizations took an aggressive turn. According to the Center for Media and Democracy’s investigatory research report, “The Googlization of the Far Right,” the corporation’s 2012 list of grantees featured a new group of antigovernment groups known for their opposition to regulation and taxes and their support for climate-change denial, including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Koch brothers–funded Heritage Action, and other antiregulatory groups such as the Federalist Society and the Cato Institute. The corporation also quietly acknowledged its membership in the corporate lobbying group ALEC, known for its opposition to gun control and emissions curbs, and for its support for voter-suppression schemes, tobacco industry tax breaks, and other far-right causes. Meanwhile, a list of Google Policy Fellows for 2014 included individuals from a range of nonprofit organizations whom one would expect to be leading the fight against that corporation’s concentrations of information and power, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Future of Privacy Forum, the National Consumers League, the Citizen Lab, and the Asociación por los Derechos Civiles. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Rebecca MacKinnon-style critique of corporate co-optation of civil society, and to general literature on regulatory capture in the digital economy. — connects to: ISPs lobbied to kill FCC privacy rules, claiming unfair competition with Google — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 532; Google cast itself as a disrupter fighting incumbent-funded politicians — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 398; Google funds think tanks to shape policy narratives in its favor — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 401 (+2 more)
• SEED: The ‘Googlization of the Far Right’ funding pattern is a concrete, documentable angle for an essay on how platform money flows into antiregulatory civil society organizations.

Broader Connections

• Google treats public resistance as an obstacle to be managed commercially #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 442