Google: Hmm, this government regulation stuff looks important. Let's stick some more lobbyists on that Facing down an increased interest in tech regulation, Google is said to be rejigging its global lobbying efforts and upping its focus on privacy and competition. The search and ad giant might not have garnered quite the column inches that Facebook and its oblivious boss Mark Zuckerberg has – but it is still in lawmakers' …
"It will see the public policy team renamed "government affairs and public policy"
From "public" to...
"to successfully engage with governments and other stakeholders,"
"stakeholders"... all in 1 text. Well, I guess the reality is that after all, so why not.
P.S. how in journalism do you quote a sentence that contains quotes? Double quote... ""Blah said: "blah blah""?
"We'll give you the money if you make the law in our favor."
At the risk of being overly pedantic, that's closer to bribery than it is extortion. Extortion would be something like "If you make the law in our favor, we won't do [insert something bad] to you". Candidates for the something bad can be virtually anything--Google has that power.
The powers to be at Chocolate Factory seem to be paying attention to what is happening to Suckerberg and do not want to targeted like him. Thus, the lobbying is an obvious effort to if not stop various investigations and regulations to at least 'influence' them to a more 'suitable' outcome for Chocolate Factory. As an industry comes under more scrutiny, lobbying and influence peddling become more critical. Also, Chocolate Factory got badly outmaneuvered with recent EU copyright changes for this round.
Google has a monopoly on search because they can better target what you want to see because they have this little thing called Google analytics running on almost every major website.
Websites want to be on the top of the searches so that people can find them. The first thing they do is embed Google analytics. Without it, your page rank drops dramatically. Right El Reg? (Notice how no one at El Reg ever reports on this little known fact? ) This is why no other search engine or technology can touch Google. And also because their algo for page searches is proprietary, we have no way of knowing.
So every time you search... they know. Even if you use a different search engine to find the page because the target page reports back to them.
So the Chocolate Factory can print money. They can censor things or promote things at will. In short, they can influence your purchasing decisions without you realizing it.
Google doesn't want you to know so that they best thing that they can do is to attempt to influence politicians who don't understand and don't care as long as they keep getting re-elected and rich while in office. (At least here in the US)
Google doesn't want the US Government to upset the apple cart, so the only thing that they can do quietly is lobby the government.
If you don't believe me, run NoScript and see what sites have Google Analytics.
Posted Anon for the obvious reason. Google doesn't want the truth to get out.
They are more powerful than any single government. They know more about you than the CIA, NSA, MI-5, MI-6, FSB, etc ... combined.
Google has a monopoly on search because they plough money from their advertising business into buying,"default search," status on most platforms, and the proles don't know to change it. They do so well in the ad business by leveraging their position as the default search. There are laws against that kind of thing, which is why google is employing someone whose actual job title is a euphemism for,"licker of politicos' bumholes."
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