[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.

[blub]

It's difficult to understand the purpose of your comment except as a Google apology, which I'm sure they can do fine without, seeing that they're a huge corporation paying a lot of money to have the friendly ear of government representatives.

Yes, there's a lot of things going wrong in the world. Today we discuss Google, tomorrow Microsoft, etc. There's enough for everybody.