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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

Google was also very positively connected to the Obama administration. It was some googlers that stepped in and turned around healthcare.gov for instance. I've heard a lot of rumors that they gave a lot of data access to the campaigns too.

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Not only is the amount of revolving door between Google and the Obama administration well documented, but Eric Schmidt was literally part of Hillary's campaign staff and personally funded a company to provide her campaign's development and infrastructure.

Suffice to say, they have a lot less allies in DC this year, and even Democrats are starting to look negatively on them now.

Although this is a minor digression, I always felt that it was very interesting to contrast the overwhelming amount of airtime on the legacy media devoted to throwing fuel on the fire of "Russian interference in the 2016 election" with the scant concern for Alphabet's working relationship with the Clinton Campaign. I know I'm not the only person concerned with the disproportionate influence that companies like Google, Twitter, etc have on modern political discourse. Isn't it frightening that the assistance of such companies can be bought with the promise of regulatory lenience? Even if someone didn't agree with the previous statement, isn't it still of significant concern that the companies controlling the flow of information are participants in partisan politics?

I don't know about data accesse rumors but the fact that a bunch of Googlers did government work during the Obama years is well documented, that said the FTC is an independent agency with commissioners from both parties and they unanimously voted against going to court.

Google engineers also built Obama's campaign software. The relationship was far tighter than most people realize.

They built his campaign software while working for Google? Are you sure about that?

I think you're jumping to a conclusion with that phrasing. It's very likely they happened to also volunteer (or maybe be hired by) the campaign WHILE also happening to be employed by Google.

And Google would allow their employees to build IP for a particular political campaign? That is, they would waive their rights to the IP produced by their employees for the specific benefit of a particular candidate? That seems unlikely.

Eric Schmidt literally went out of his way to organize the Clinton IT infrastructure on ridiculously good terms.

https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-...

The idea that he utilized Google resources to do the same for Obama while he had more direct influence over Google isn't a crazy idea.

And he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, not by exercising his influence at Google. By the way, we are quite far afield from the initial claim that Google employees wrote software for a particular political campaign.

> And he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, not by exercising his influence at Google. By the way, we are quite far afield from the initial claim that Google employees wrote software for a particular political campaign.

Google has been providing free services to campaigns it wants to help for over a decade, in the open. This started when Schmidt was CEO.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118489524982572543

The Obama campaign was the first to really realize the importance of IT infrastructure, _and_ their whole shtick (more or less neoliberalism with a friendly face) aligns really well with Google's political goals.

I'm not really sure why you seem to think that this is some conspiracy theory, when everyone involved is openly talking about it.

Nothing in that article corroborates any of the claims mentioned by others above. I notice that the farther down in the thread this conversation goes, the more watered down the accusations of political meddling get. Next you’ll criticize Google for letting campaigns use Gmail or something.

Board members are not company employees, and Eric Schmidt is not a Google engineer as GP claimed. This is a stretch even by conspiracist standards.

Schmidt was the CEO of Google during the first Obama campaign in 2008, and during most of the ramp up to the 2012 campaign.

Google has various programs under which employees can release code without having to care too much about the broad copyright assumptions in their contracts.

The two most popular are https://opensource.google.com/docs/releasing/ (which is for open source code, with (C) Google, because with open source you mostly don't have to care much about that line) and https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ (author retains copyright, no open source requirement or association with Google at all).

IARC should be quite suitable for projects on "contentious" topics like politics or religion: Google generally stays clear of these topics (so there won't be a conflict of interest in building something like that, as Google just isn't active in that market), and the company won't have to deal with being associated with one team (versus all the others) through some side hustle they can barely control.

(Disclosure: working at Google, but far from the licensing folks. I found them reasonable to argue with, though.)

I would find it surprising that Google would be OK with that, particularly because it could be construed as them contributing to some campaign. An employee writing a check to the campaign? That’s perfectly fine, Google has no say over that. An employee producing IP for a campaign? Well, Google does technically have a say over that and would have to waive their right of ownership of said IP...

I am not the slave of anyone or anything. What I do on my own time is my own thing.

That’s nice that you believe that. If you have a job, maybe read your employment contract first next time.

They took leaves of absence, with the company's blessing. And Google is incorporated in California, which has strict laws that employees are allowed to develop what they like when they're not on the clock using company resources.

It's interesting people here are calling this a "conspiracy theory" when I guarantee you there are hundreds if not thousands of posters here who remember the TGIF and groups discussions where this came up.

At least admit that your initial statement was unclear at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. You made it sound like Googlers, in their capacity as employees, were working for a political campaign.

>And Google is incorporated in California, which has strict laws that employees are allowed to develop what they like when they're not on the clock using company resources.

Not really. Try to develop a search engine in your spare time and see what happens.

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