[kneel]

Google has collected vasts amount of information and they can recruit skill and develop almost any type of software they want.

It seems like a no brainer they're going to play an ever growing role in government.

How big a role do they play? What is the limits?

[JoshTriplett]

Conversely, the government represents one of the biggest threats to Google-sized companies, so it's not at all surprising that such companies preemptively maintain influence with governments with applicable jurisdiction.

If there wasn't a steady stream of new threats (ranging from minor to existential) coming out of government, there'd be less need to maintain influence within it.

[_audakel]

Is it a bad thing that Google plays a more involved role? They have on numerous occasions lent their technical expertise to improve horibly broke aspects of the federal govt (Healthcare.Gov is an example) . If they can improve the technical aspects (open apis for govt data for example), it might help bring more light to the parts of govt that are unavailable to ordinary citizens.

[azakai]

It's not good or bad necessarily, but it is incredibly dangerous.

Google is a massive corporation with unprecedented information about ordinary people. Information that we would never let governments collect on us. As Google becomes more connected to governments, that separation might break down.

The Snowden revelations showed us part of the hidden picture here. But the public picture, as described in this article, is enough to worry about.

[maxander]

No one cares if they build websites for the gov't (indeed it's exemplary citizenship), the concern is rather that their involvement will include influencing policy. They have many interests relating to existing or potential regulations (on self-driving cars or big-data mining, for instance.) Their interests aren't necessarily so obviously malign as oil or cigarette lobbyists, but we'd still like regulators to be theoretically acting purely for the sake of the public good.