Google doesn't need the paltry revenue from the NSA for their bottom line, Assange plays guilt by association, but doesn't address motives.
I have no doubt that Google is trying to stay on Congress's good side, after all, Microsoft funded an array of lobbyist organizations trying to get the government to shakedown Google, and their increase in lobbying spending is no doubt a response. It's pretty clear how this game works with regulatory capture, Congress threatens to regulate your business, you in turn, are forced to donate to their re-election campaign for 'protection'.
Less clear is whether playing nice with the State Department buys you anything. Assange makes it sound like Chomsky's conspiracy theories over pipelines, that Google has fruit plantations or oil pipelines abroad that need State Department protection, and somehow the State Department has some quid pro quo. But what can the State Department actually offer Google? They have no control over some of Google's biggest foreign issues: Chinese and Russian markets, foreign taxes. At best, the executive branch could back off investigations or approve mergers. But the evidence is mixed. Obama just veto'ed the Samsung ban on Apple, but allowed Apple's ITC ban on some Motorola devices to continue.
And what to make of the Cohen thing. So, Google is supposedly being contracted by the State Department or CIA to cause foreign uprisings now? Isn't it far more likely that the social, economic, and culture conditions that are fueling these uprisings have been boiling for years and that Google had little to do with them? Google, Facebook, and Twitter basically want users, and to promote digital media, and these uprisings which heavily used their services actually was good PR for social media overall.
I dislike the way many people analyze the motivations of those in other nations so as to remove local agency. Those same people will tell you, how dare you, look down on people in these countries, at the same time, viewing all local politics and local agendas as really being driven by the plans of external actors.
If Cohen was meeting with people in Iran and Azerbaijan, why does it have to be for some ominous CIA purpose. Couldn't it have been for existing projects Google Ideas already had? Google has been going all over the developing world evangelizing use of things like Google Maps for tracking local issues, like human, gun, or drug trafficking, environmental degradation, or even vanishing languages. Cohen's previous job would have given him the right contacts to make foreign connections in foreign governments, and is the perfect reason why Silicon Valley companies would hire people from the State Department who have foreign service experience. How many MBA grads working in Silicon Valley actually have any experience navigating say, foreign government officials in Kenya? For the same reason, the government hires Silicon Valley workers to work on government IT projects, because you go where the experience is. (e.g. data.gov)
None of this disproves anything, but I find the dots being connected here to be very tenuous.
He never gives a single example of such a favor. DC isn't a homogeneous place either. What the executive branch and congress wants are often different and at odds. Making nice with the Executive Branch maybe gets you favorite treatment from the DoJ or IRS -- maybe. It's not clear the Obama administration has been overly favorite to Google's interests.
Google's biggest threats come from congressional legislation, hence the lobbying, including to climate change deniers.
My point is, this is all insinuation, tenuous at best.
On #2, that's been discussed over and over, but the fact is, Google was only doing what everyone else was doing (Facebook apps for example), making sure that Federated Login stilled worked, and that other cookies that came along were accidental and due to a bug in Safari which Google engineers had submitted a fix for months earlier before the brouhaha even erupted. Google deleted the cookies and stopped using the bug. How much do you think they should have been fined, billions? How do you price setting a few cookies on someone in terms of harm?
On #3, street view cars were collecting already available publicly accessible information that anyone else with a Wifi capable device can collect off of unsecured networks, and the purpose is to map SSID geolocations for Wifi-based Location, like Skyhook ad everyone else. Again, what do you think the fine should be for this?
On the patent issue let's face the facts that this is all motivated as a defensive measure as Apple and Microsoft are patent trolling against Android and Google is trying to put up a fight to bring the others to a negotiated MAD position. I find the FRAND issue somewhat of a smokescreen, since one could argue that multitouch, or rounded corners, et al are 'essential' to a smartphone from a consumers point of view, a defacto standard of consumer expectation. Should Apple be permitted a monopoly on this and block competitors with ITC bans? The FTC treatment of Google, is if anything, preferential towards Google competitors. Obama has done nothing to fix the patent war mess.
Before you can claim they got preferential treatment, you have to put forward a credible argument as to what the original punishment should have been.
Did you find it odd when Vice Media took Dennis Rodman and the Harlem GlobeTrotters to NK?
Eric Schmidt has been traveling around the globe lately as he was researching for his book, he also went to Burma and a few other places. I'm not really sure what the claims are supposed to be, what was he going to do in NK that the State Department couldn't do themselves? Spy? Negotiate nuclear arms?
When Tom Friedman travels to say, Sri Lanka, is it on behalf of the CIA, or because he wants to write another sappy book on globalization?
Sometimes things are much more mundane. Vice media actually got to meet NK leadership (dinner with Kim Jong Un), but they were really just looking to do gonzo journalism -- even if they were debriefed by the government when they returned.
I have no doubt that Google is trying to stay on Congress's good side, after all, Microsoft funded an array of lobbyist organizations trying to get the government to shakedown Google, and their increase in lobbying spending is no doubt a response. It's pretty clear how this game works with regulatory capture, Congress threatens to regulate your business, you in turn, are forced to donate to their re-election campaign for 'protection'.
Less clear is whether playing nice with the State Department buys you anything. Assange makes it sound like Chomsky's conspiracy theories over pipelines, that Google has fruit plantations or oil pipelines abroad that need State Department protection, and somehow the State Department has some quid pro quo. But what can the State Department actually offer Google? They have no control over some of Google's biggest foreign issues: Chinese and Russian markets, foreign taxes. At best, the executive branch could back off investigations or approve mergers. But the evidence is mixed. Obama just veto'ed the Samsung ban on Apple, but allowed Apple's ITC ban on some Motorola devices to continue.
And what to make of the Cohen thing. So, Google is supposedly being contracted by the State Department or CIA to cause foreign uprisings now? Isn't it far more likely that the social, economic, and culture conditions that are fueling these uprisings have been boiling for years and that Google had little to do with them? Google, Facebook, and Twitter basically want users, and to promote digital media, and these uprisings which heavily used their services actually was good PR for social media overall.
I dislike the way many people analyze the motivations of those in other nations so as to remove local agency. Those same people will tell you, how dare you, look down on people in these countries, at the same time, viewing all local politics and local agendas as really being driven by the plans of external actors.
If Cohen was meeting with people in Iran and Azerbaijan, why does it have to be for some ominous CIA purpose. Couldn't it have been for existing projects Google Ideas already had? Google has been going all over the developing world evangelizing use of things like Google Maps for tracking local issues, like human, gun, or drug trafficking, environmental degradation, or even vanishing languages. Cohen's previous job would have given him the right contacts to make foreign connections in foreign governments, and is the perfect reason why Silicon Valley companies would hire people from the State Department who have foreign service experience. How many MBA grads working in Silicon Valley actually have any experience navigating say, foreign government officials in Kenya? For the same reason, the government hires Silicon Valley workers to work on government IT projects, because you go where the experience is. (e.g. data.gov)
None of this disproves anything, but I find the dots being connected here to be very tenuous.