
Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign - NN88
https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-googles-academic-influence-campaign-1499785286
======
gnicholas
> _The money didn’t influence his work, Mr. Heald said, and Google issued no
> conditions: “They said, ‘If you take this $20,000 and open up a doughnut
> shop with it—we’ll never give you any more money—but that’s fine.’”_

At a glance, this seems like the funds are no-strings-attached. But when you
think for a minute, you realize it's the exact opposite.

Google is saying that if they don't like what you do with the money, they
won't give you any more — but if they do like what you do with it then you
might get more. This incentivizes the professor to use the money to do things
that Google would like, which is the opposite of no-strings-attached.

There technically are no strings attached to _this_ money, but the possibility
of future payments (which ranged from $5k to $400k) is a pretty big
enticement.

~~~
__bjoernd
But that's how most research funding works. The same is true if you get a
government research grant - do what you want, but if they don't like your
results, they are unlikely to fund you another round.

~~~
gnicholas
I think this is less of a concern with government funding, since in many cases
the government doesn't care what you find — they just want you to do reliable
research to see what the answers to relevant questions are.

For example, if you say "I'm going to research the effect of eating lots of
eggs on cholesterol", the government won't care what outcome you find/publish.
They funded you because they want the truth to come out about the question you
seek to answer. There are some topics where the government "has a dog in the
fight" — but much of their research funding is for areas where they are truly
agnostic.

Google, on the other hand, only funded research related to their business. So
they had an agenda, and all the parties knew it.

I'm not saying they shouldn't have been able to fund this, or that this is any
worse than other industry-funded research. Just that it seems some professors
did not make the relevant disclosures, and there was a pretty strong incentive
for professors not to bite the hand that feeds them.

~~~
Godel_unicode
You're comparing apples to oranges; Government not caring about
negative/positive results and Google only funding things they care about.

Are you implying that government funds research when the topic isn't something
they care about, or that Google only likes positive results?

~~~
gnicholas
No, I was responding to a comment that made a comparison between Google and
government. I'm not saying the government never cares about the outcome of
research, just that some (much? most?) of their funding goes to answering
research questions where the government is agnostic.

~~~
caseysoftware
The government is made up of people who are fundamentally no better or worse
than anyone else.

Instead of accepting that _anyone_ is an angel or devil, we should approach
all results with a critical eye and push for reproducibility.

------
sapote
I know that the story is nonsense -- I am part of a research group that's
gotten such grants before. This is basically a story aiming to confuse those
who don't understand how research works. Google is funding work that aligns
with what they do, but the grants they give are no-strings-attached and are
tiny. (Government grants are much bigger.)

Sure, Google only funds things that are related to what they care about, but
of course that's the case. And these days the NSF is partnering with Intel,
VMware, and others to give out grants on things that align with those
companies.

The WSJ has been sniffing around for this for a long time, and actually was
trying to get professors' private email claiming that their email should be in
the public domain. (I don't know if they succeeded.) I actually see this as
part of the larger trend of trying to discredit research.

Edited to add: the story focuses on policy and law research, which is easier
to attack, and I don't have any interest in defending that. But I'm willing to
bet that the amount of grant money Google gives out for that work is probably
tiny compared to funding they give for CS research. And it's the latter I'm
familiar with.

~~~
blub
Who funds a research should be written in bold on the first page together with
their interest in the topic and any potential conflicts of interest.

The fact that the contributions were not disclosed is highly suspicious.
Google is also not merely funding works that aligns with what they do, it's
apparently "helped finance hundreds of research papers to DEFEND against
_regulatory challenges_ of its _market dominance_ ", which puts this in a
completely different perspective. Care to comment on that?

I found another quote which is frankly mind-boggling
([http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/11/paying-
profes...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/11/paying-professors-
inside-googles-academic-2.html)):

"""In some years, Google officials in Washington compiled wish lists of
academic papers that included working titles, abstracts and budgets for each
proposed paper -- then they searched for willing authors, according to a
former employee and a former Google lobbyist.

Google promotes the research papers to government officials, and sometimes
pays travel expenses for professors to meet with congressional aides and
administration officials, according to the former lobbyist. The research has
been used, for instance, to deflect antitrust accusations against Google by
the Federal Trade Commission in 2012, according to a letter Google attorneys
sent to the FTC chairman and viewed by the Journal."""

WTF? They're basically lobbying and paying professors to deflect antitrust
accusations and there are people here DEFENDING them?!

~~~
sapote
I'm talking about CS research. I don't really consider law research and public
policy research as real research -- that's lobbying and conflating the two is
just for a headline.

Edited to add: the WSJ went on a fishing expedition -- while the story is on a
few law grant tidbits that they could make into a headline, they actually were
trying to get access to the private email of many CS professors. What probably
happened is that they got some of that email (which I don't think they should
have access to, but that's another story) and found there was nothing
interesting to write about, so they found a few lobbying tidbits and painted
it all with a broad brush.

~~~
jgalt212
> law research and public policy research as real research

some would argue that this is the most important research Google sponsors
these days as protecting their monopoly will preserve/create more value than
most any new fangled CS thing they can come up with.

------
mlinksva
This must be Google's response [https://www.blog.google/topics/public-
policy/responding-camp...](https://www.blog.google/topics/public-
policy/responding-campaign-accountability-report-academic-research/)

~~~
euyyn
Oh, wow.

------
surveilmebro
To be fair, similar tactics are standard practice in many non-tech fields:
pharmaceuticals, law, and agronomy to name a few. What's perhaps different
here is that researchers may not be accustomed to disclosing financial support
that is only weakly connected to the research in question.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Sure. Nobody's saying that Google's invented a new strategy here. We've all
known Phillip Morris, Monsanto, and the like to do this, but generally such
companies have been derided for the behavior. People are generally hesitant to
group Google in the same class of corporate actor.

~~~
bykovich2
The notion that a given multinational billion-dollar syndicate is not going to
engage in the behavior characteristic of multinational billion-dollar
syndicates because it's run by nerds instead of suits seems, at the very
least, suspect.

~~~
lovemenot
So let's go ahead and proselytise this cynicism until the general population
is as distrustful of their new corporate champions as they are of their now-
reviled older champions.

------
amoorthy
Hi folks - below is an article I read recently which opened my eyes to the
risks of corporate funded research. Companies have long funded research to
back their interests that can have serious ramifications on public safety and
use of public resources.

Long read but enjoyable and informative.

[1]: The Most Important Scientist You've Never Heard Of:
[http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-
scienti...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-
who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it)

~~~
ucaetano
Well, that is the alternative? Forbidding privately-funded research?
Submitting it to gigantic bureaucratic committees?

The only proposal I back is forcing publicly-funded researchers to disclose
all gifts and grants, similarly to public officials, but even that is a
massive bureaucratic ordeal.

Research is not a regulated environment, and it should not be one.

~~~
amoorthy
I think the suggestion is simple: Disclose funding sources and % of funding
total for any research. And if you don't disclose then no journal should
accept your paper.

Funding source does not by itself invalidate findings and corporations
absolutely should continue to fund research. But for readers of research this
is critical information.

I may be naive but this does not seem like a big bureaucratic ask. And even if
it were seems like good scientists would do it because they pride themselves
on pursuing the truth with impeccable attention to detail.

~~~
ucaetano
That is a fair suggestion, but the devil is in the details: how do you
implement that?

How do you prevent journals from accepting? How do you force researchers to
disclose?

~~~
amoorthy
Journals that accept papers that don't disclose funding sources progressively
lose their credibility.

(I am not a scientist and have never published a paper so I may be asking for
things here that are unreasonable but they seem plausible and useful to me).

------
ucaetano
Wait, a profit-driven company is spending money supporting research into areas
related to the company's interests?

Why is this even news? Is there a single for-profit company that funds
research contrary to the company's interests?

~~~
caseysoftware
Because some groups have a vested interest (no pun intended) in building and
protecting the notion that professors, scientists, and researchers* are angels
without financial conflicts, personal biases, or even emotions. If people
realize that they're all humans with flaws just like the rest of us, people
might stop and think instead of blindly accepting their conclusions as Truth.

* Except for the professors, scientists, and researchers funded by those other guys, they're malicious, biased liars trying to destroy the world.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It is definitely hard to reconcile the "science is science" notion I hear on a
lot of political topics here on HN (particularly on the left) with the general
acceptance in this thread that it's okay that much of that much of academia is
funded by biased sources.

~~~
lallysingh
Science is still the genuine best effort approach to finding out the truth.
It's still done by humans, with all their failings, but it's the best we have.
And it should be treated as the best we have, especially when compared to
other sources.

------
NN88
Full Text:

[http://archive.is/8pkAH](http://archive.is/8pkAH)

------
nl
_Several papers argued that Google’s search engine should be allowed to link
to books and other intellectual property that authors and publishers say
should be paid for—a group that includes News Corp, which owns the Journal.
News Corp formally complained to European regulators about Google’s handling
of news articles in search results._

Yeah.

And all those graphs showing how big Google is have nothing to do with the
story. News Corp wants an anti-trust investigation into Google in the US too.

------
Gustomaximus
History repeats. This was a tactic by Microsoft in the old MS vs. Mac days.
They gave 'no strings' funding to top tier uni professors with the tacit
expectation everything was to be PC based and to support MS in general.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
A company using the skyhigh profits it makes from it's market dominance to
fund academic research arguing that it doesn't abuse it's market dominance?
Perfect.

If you're looking for arguments for antitrust in this area beyond consumer
welfare you've found them. The concentrated wealth produced by big
monopolistic firms has a gravity field of it's own, distorting public
information and opinion.

------
mankash666
Ridiculous! This is how ALL academic funding works. The headline might as well
read NSF/NIH is paying professors for propagating "views". Given that Murdoch
owns WSJ, fundamental science like evolution and global warming morph into
"views", not facts/axioms.

~~~
jgalt212
You're ignore that NSF/NIH funded research is plainly visible as the source of
the funding upon publication of the research.

------
sjg007
This is nothing new. Happens with sugar lobby, happened with big tobacco and
happens on climate change etc...

These are questions whose context depends on how you frame the debate. Those
who frame it get to decide the playground. Helps too if you have the
regulators in the same framework as well.

By framing one can argue that google is a monopoly vs it's a small player in
global advertising etc... Vs Facebook etc.. same thing with net neutrality.

I think the Europeans are probably further ahead of the us on asking the right
questions.

We seem to have fallen backwards where foreign power influence on our
elections is reframed away.

~~~
flyovercow
dont be evil. i remember that. i remember when the internet was a promise....a
promise to level the playing field. to give ordinary people something they
never had. access. a new space. a new frontier. where we would build a better
world, better than the one we came from. without worries about corrupt power
hierarchies, without endless greed, without pointless cruelty. we were there
to make something. to build. to create. to make this new world beautiful, a
better version of ourselves. how far we have fallen. how much we have
forgotten, forgotten where we came from or why we trekked here. they reached
us after all, never more than a deal away, their sickness contagious, we all
caught it, we are all guilty of it now. no more new world. just new greed. new
corruption. new power hierarchies.

internet is dead. long live internet.

------
gcb0
mentioned that a few days ago in another discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14700610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14700610)

------
ocdtrekkie
Sadly, this has been a known fact for a long time, and it never gets a lot of
attention. Joshua Wright, the former FTC Commissioner, was one of the
professors previously paid to write 'academic studies' for Google.

------
TrickyRick
Paywall...

