You are talking about a group of people mostly from places like EFF, Creative Commons, and other wonderful orgs. They do it because they want to make the world better, and because it's the right thing to do. Maybe you are too cynical and jaded to do something like that, but they aren't. Your opinions have zero basis in fact.
There is a difference between the people Google has employed to do the work and the corporate strategy behind the work. I have no doubt that the people you describe are truly passionate and dedicated.
But you don't see Google funding advocacy groups for initiatives that don't have a corresponding corporate benefit. Google's evolving stance on net neutrality is a case in point. An analogy would be a housing development firm supporting advocacy of home loans for the poor.
"There is a difference between the people Google has employed to do the work and the corporate strategy behind the work. I have no doubt that the people you describe are truly passionate and dedicated."
Of course there is difference, but you haven't explained what evidence you have that this it the corporate strategy. I actually know the corporate strategy, and i'm stating for a fact it's not as self-interested as you think. You don't have to believe me of course, and I'm not crazy enough to claim google doesn't have interests, but you present it as a very cynical 100% self-interested thing and it's simply not.
"But you don't see Google funding advocacy groups for initiatives that don't have a corresponding corporate benefit."
????
I think you are confused about what google funds.
What is your source of info? Press releases? Have you considered that maybe they don't let press releases happen because they just want the org to succeed, rather than being cynical and self-interested and trying to get credit, and that's why you don't know about it?
I personally helped fund opening of of polling location data (IE getting states to let us tell us where people vote so we could help people find their polling places).
https://votinginfoproject.org/
There are now other partners, but Google created it, and funded it, as a separate org.
This was done for no other reason that I felt this was data that should be open, and it was completely ridiculous that you needed to pay various providers (many many figures) in order to get data on telling people where to vote.
This project was entirely altruistic - people were often confused by the info they had, or forgot, or something else. I wanted to solve this problem. There was no money, ads, or anything involved.
My group also funds the software freedom law center, software freedom conservancy, osu labs, etc.
Not just open source either.
We fund many millions of dollars to organizations because it's the right thing to do and the orgs are fighting for the right things.
Policy does the same. Of course, they do some advocacy and lobbying. But not all or even most of it has any direct corporate benefit.
In DC alone, Google funds a lot of dc related homeless and other advocacy organizations. Do you think Google has designs on ads for homeless people?
So when you say "But you don't see Google funding advocacy groups for initiatives that don't have a corresponding corporate benefit.", it would be more correct to say You don't see. And by "You don't see", that's often because Google doesn't put out press about it, because that's not the point. That would be self interested on Google's part.
The point is to help the org.
I am very cynical about Google these days after the revelations about its cooperation with the NSA.
Thanks for your work and I hope you don't take my remarks as any kind of criticism of the work you do.
Put more cautiously, I think indirect corporate benefit is the main impetus for Google's philanthropy and lobbying programs. There is not necessarily a specific business outcome associated with the philanthropy... it's more like "branding" and "brand awareness" campaigns. The payoff is far into the future and is extremely hard to measure.
It is likely you have even less of an idea of what you're talking about when it comes to Google's interactions with NSA than you do about how their motivations w/r/t SOPA.
I have, at length, in the past, and it's very disingenuous of you to pretend that you don't know that. Most people who accuse Google of being a tool of NSA have the excuse that they got the idea from the Guardian, which later retract^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontradicted itself out of the accusation. But you know that already. You accuse Google of being a tool of NSA because you want them to be, because you believe that by repeating a lie over and over again you can somehow crowbar reality into your weird little conspiracy theory, or at least get a bunch of people on HN on board with it.
You are partially right. All of my beliefs are provisional and I'm waiting to be proven wrong. I'd very much prefer to believe that Google acted properly (not necessarily legally) with respect to its cooperation with NSA. To date I am still not convinced.
How is it possible to feel comfortable with Google's answers when you consider that companies are forbidden from disclosing some information? I'm equally skeptical of the truthfulness of both Google's and the NSA's responses to the revelations.
I'm not able to accept the whole "trust us, everything was circuitously legal so there's nothing to worry about" excuse.
"How is it possible to feel comfortable with Google's answers when you consider that companies are forbidden from disclosing some information?"
Because you are implicitly claiming that not a single VP, SVP, well known person, etc, would be ethical enough to quit over this if Google had done it wrong.
Given who those people are, it seems far fetched.
I hope you're right. That is certainly what I thought before the Snowden revelations. To date I don't think Google has offered sufficient transparency into the process to adequately restore trust. If the NSA (via secret laws or dictums) is preventing this from happening, it is at the expense of Google's reputation.
Further, the recent revelations that the NSA deploys agents as employees of various tech companies (like Google) indicates that Google's internal security processes have been breached and the careful (and likely reasonable) way that cooperation with law enforcement has been crafted may be largely irrelevant.
The above may be wild speculation, and I hope it's incorrect. But considering the Snowden revelations I don't think Google has done enough to make a person or firm that explicitly didn't want the NSA to have access to data its feel comfortable using Google's network and services to store/transmit it.
And, since Google's core business is ads, Google has designed its own systems so that data from any Google service (analytics, dns, gmail, doubleclick) can be used for targeting and behavioral profiling. The scope of it is really quite impressive. Thus I think it's sobering to think about all the data being readily available to the NSA, as Snowden suggests it is.
There is a difference between the people Google has employed to do the work and the corporate strategy behind the work. I have no doubt that the people you describe are truly passionate and dedicated.
But you don't see Google funding advocacy groups for initiatives that don't have a corresponding corporate benefit. Google's evolving stance on net neutrality is a case in point. An analogy would be a housing development firm supporting advocacy of home loans for the poor.