https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/google-is-losing-allies-across-the-political-spectrum/

Google is losing allies across the political spectrum
Timothy B. Lee - Aug 31, 2017 6:36 pm UTC

Eight years ago, Google was on top of the world. People across the
political spectrum saw the search giant as a symbol of high-tech
innovation. During the just-completed 2008 presidential campaign cycle,
candidates as diverse as Ron Paul, John McCain, and Barack Obama had all
made pilgrimages to Google's Mountain View headquarters to burnish their
reputations for tech savvy.

Even better, Google soon had a close relationship to the newly elected
president, Barack Obama. "Google was riding high on the fact that Eric
Schmidt was campaigning for Obama," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media
studies professor at the University of Virginia and a longtime Google
critic. "There was a lot of attention paid in the press to the fact that
Googlers were starting to work in the White House."

With so many Googlers in government, Google had an outsized influence on
policymaking during the Obama years. But today, Google is in a different
situation. Most obviously, Schmidt worked hard to get Hillary Clinton
elected president, and Clinton lost.

The issues don't end there. Given Silicon Valley's liberal views on
social issues and Schmidt's love for Democratic politicians, it was
probably inevitable that conservatives would sour on the search giant.
But the larger problem for the search giant is that the company has been
losing support among Democrats as well.

A growing number of liberal thinkers believes that the concentration of
corporate power was a major problem in the American economy. And few
companies exemplify that concentration more than Google.
Further Reading
Google-funded think tank fires prominent Google critic

That's the real significance of this week's decision by the New America
Foundation, a think tank that's heavily funded by Google, to fire the
head of its Open Markets project. For the last eight years, the Open
Markets team has been methodically building the intellectual case for
more aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws—a project that could
easily result in more regulatory scrutiny of Google.

Google is in no immediate danger on that front. Republicans are still
largely committed to a hands-off approach to economic regulation,
Democrats are out of power, and Google still has plenty of allies in the
Democratic Party.

But the longer-term trajectory here could be ominous. The combination of
Bernie Sanders-style populism on the left and Donald Trump-style
populism on the right could lead to a future where Google faces
hostility from policymakers across parties.

"There's been a really big breakthrough," says Barry Lynn, who led New
America's Open Markets team before New America fired him. "It's not just
the left. Interest in dealing with concentration of power, the fear of
concentration of power is across the spectrum."
Conservatives are increasingly hostile to Google

Conservative skepticism of Google goes back to the early years of the
Obama administration. At the time, Vaidhyanathan was working on a book,
criticizing Google, that came out in 2011. While promoting the book, he
said, he kept getting invited on talk radio—what he describes as "angry
white guy shows."

"For a couple of weeks they were really interested in Google and their
relationship with Obama," Vaidhyanathan told Ars. "And it turned out
that Glenn Beck had done one of his chalk board drawings connecting
George Soros to Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin."

Vaidhyanathan is generally a Google critic, but he found himself in the
unusual position of defending Google against unfounded conspiracy
theories. Still, there really was a close relationship between Google
and the Obama White House. And that relationship—and Schmidt's
subsequent support for Hillary Clinton—started to drive a wedge between
Google and grassroots conservatives.

Further Reading
Google fires engineer who “crossed the line” with diversity memo
Conservative skepticism of Google has only intensified in 2017. The
high-profile August firing of James Damore was one key moment here.
Damore wrote a controversial memo suggesting that Google's gender gap
might be explained by women having less interest in or aptitude for
software engineering, and the former employee argued that Google was
becoming an "ideological echo chamber" where right-of-center views
weren't welcome.

When Google terminated Damore, many conservatives argued that Google
proved Damore's point. Conservative critics believed that Damore's
arguments should have been taken seriously within Google and that Google
was essentially signalling that conservative viewpoints were not welcome
at Mountain View.

Another flashpoint came later in the month, when Google canceled the
domain name of the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer and booted a
right-wing Twitter competitor called Gab from the Android app store.
While few conservatives have sympathy for Nazis, conservatives worry
that similar reasoning could lead to censorship by Google and other
technology giants of more mainstream speech.
Further Reading
Google explains why it banned the app for Gab, a right-wing Twitter rival

That has led to the unusual spectacle of conservatives calling for
government regulation of a major American company. "Since it has the
power to censor the Internet, Google should be regulated like the public
utility it is, to make sure it doesn't further distort the free flow of
information to the rest of us," Fox News host Tucker Carlson argued.

"The evidence of Silicon Valley’s hostility to the Right is everywhere,"
wrote Jeremy Carl, a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution.
Like Carlson, Carl made the case for treating Google and other Silicon
Valley companies like public utilities.

To be clear, this is still very much a minority view on the right. Most
conservative policy experts still favor the deregulatory point of view
Republicans have advocated since the Reagan years.

Frank Pasquale, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland, points
out that, despite using some anti-monopoly rhetoric on the campaign
trail, Donald Trump has relied more on orthodox free-market
conservatives in the White House. Former Federal Trade Commissioner Josh
Wright, a skeptic of strict antitrust enforcement, served on the Trump
transition team. And Trump's choice to lead the antitrust division of
the Justice Department, Makan Delrahim, is expected to enforce antitrust
law less aggressively than his Obama administration predecessors. While
candidate Trump sometimes hinted he would declare war on major
technology companies, there has been no sign so far that he's going to
follow through on those promises.

But over the longer term, political rhetoric has a way of transforming
into political action. If hostility toward Google and other Silicon
Valley giants becomes widespread among conservatives, sooner or later
Republican politicians will find ways to capitalize on that. The next
Republican president might campaign on the same kind of anti-monopoly
rhetoric Trump did but actually follow through with it in office.

Liberals are getting worried about monopolies

Traditionally, the Democrats have been the party that cared more about
concentrations of corporate power. But under the Obama years, Google
used its considerable influence to discourage aggressive investigations
into its business practices.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has long argued that Google has used its
power in the search business to give itself an unfair advantage in
markets like online reviews. But in a June interview, he told me that
his arguments often fell on deaf ears when he talked to regulators
during the Obama years.

"We went around and talked to Federal Trade Commissioners back then,"
Stoppelman said. "It was comical. Google had been talking to them and
repeating their messages for so long that we'd go from FTC commissioner
to FTC commissioner and they'd repeat to us the same lines. They were
all Google lines."

A key moment came in 2012, when staffers at the FTC recommended bringing
a lawsuit against Google to challenge some of the search giant's
business practices. They were overruled by the FTC's commissioners, who
voted unanimously not to pursue charges against Google.

EU regulators subsequently considered a similar set of charges and
reached the opposite conclusion, handing down a $2.7 billion fine in
2017. And there are signs that Democratic politicians are increasingly
interested in pursuing similar policies here in the United States.

A key figure here is Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who gave the
keynote address at a 2016 conference organized by Lynn.

"Google, Apple, and Amazon provide platforms that lots of companies
depend on for survival," Warren said. "But Google, Apple, and Amazon
also in many cases compete with those small companies. So that platform
can become a tool to snuff out competition."