Like I commented elsewhere - why is this evil? Because Google didn't want to pay its own critics? Open Markets is free, as they themselves admit, to continue their work elsewhere. They are not entitled to Google's support.
Big companies controlling think tanks is, of course, nothing new. But we tend to hold tech icons like Google to a higher standard, and trust them much further, than we do with oil companies or banks.
We have to if we want to overcome the cognitive dissonance involved with trusting them with our data in the face of such news as that linked above. If we can't trust them to play nice on this, how can we expect them to protect our privacy from snoops?
Google plays a huge role in our lives, but it is also a corporation that has a duty to its shareholders. The EU's decision has an impact on their profits that has the potential to affect their future revenue opportunities. I'd see an issue if Google was intentionally burying information from this group, but choosing not to fund them seems like a perfectly rational, fair thing to do.
This seems like a rhetorical argument that conflates power and self-interest with morality. Google certainly has the power to do it, and certainly anyone can see its self-interest, but that doesn't mean it should; power and self-interest are not the only factors.
There is clear harm to society if the powerful use their power to limit public criticism, and that's a well-known, ongoing problem in the U.S. (among other places).
> Open Markets is free, as they themselves admit, to continue their work elsewhere.
The money must come from somebody with power and resources. They are free-as-in-speech to move on, but not as-in-beer.
Sort of hamfisted on the part of Google though. Being pro-Google is now a requirement for getting funding from a democratic aligned think-tank.