[kbenson]

The supporting evidence of their argument was two separate items, that Eric Schmidt set up a data company for the sole purpose of getting Hillary elected, which is entirely unsupported by the reference they provided, and that Google visited the white house a lot, which while supported has nothing to do with bribery when taken by itself.

I took "depending on your definition of bribery" to be implying that these visits indicate some behavior akin to or equal to bribery, and quoting the definition as a succinct way to note that they aren't equivalent at all as currently explained. I thought that was sufficient because unlike you I did not interpret that comment as clearly trying to make a more sophisticated point, but as trying to allude to misconduct from facts which have entirely benign explanations. It's possible there was misconduct, but assuming so from the information presented is not a way to have a rational discussion on the topic.

[metaphorm]

quite a lot of perfectly legal behavior, that would not be called misconduct by a prosecutor or investigator, can still be on shaky ethical grounds for various reasons.

surely Google does not visit the white house just because they enjoy the breakfast buffet. they're lobbying for their business interests. this isn't necessarily unethical at all, but when you look at the pattern of campaign contributions and think tank funding (and various other kinds of pulling of influence levers) you start to find the grey area.

I probably wouldn't go so far as to call it bribery, but it's not a clear cut thing. I'm nearly certain that is why the poster said "depending on your definition of bribery". He/she was (in my interpretation) intending to discuss that grey area. Shutting down that discussion by throwing the dictionary at him/her is both rude and unhelpful. There might really be an interesting discussion of ethical grey areas in political lobbying activities to be had, but not if you're gonna shut it down with that kind of reactionary literalism.

[kbenson]

> they're lobbying for their business interests.

Yes. But some visits could also have been the White House soliciting information from the industry, or from multiple industries, since Google is in many markets. Indeed, Google's own response called out the many different subjects discussed.

Asked to respond, Google spokesperson Riva Litman referred The Intercept to a blog post written when the Wall Street Journal raised similar questions a year ago. In that post, Google said the meetings covered a host of topics, including patent reform, STEM education, internet censorship, cloud computing, trade and investment, and smart contact lenses. The company also claimed to have counted similar numbers of visits to the White House by Microsoft and Comcast — but it did not explain its methodology for parsing the data.

You've let the initial description of the visits already influence your assessment of what they were about. Were some traditional lobbying as expected from large corporations with interests? Undoubtedly. But that doesn't mean every visit was, especially for a company that has been very open about investing into research in forefront technologies, the type of thing the White House might want to keep abreast of, or about increasing certain types of educational outcomes, which is also a subject often addressed by the White House. Also note, in the referenced article their numbers they appear to be including state dinners and white hours tours in their numbers, as they had to distinguish why their chart doesn't actually show the same number they quote in some instances.

> I'm nearly certain that is why the poster said "depending on your definition of bribery". He/she was (in my interpretation) intending to discuss that grey area.

Then they should have discussed that grey area more specifically rather than case allusions.

> Shutting down that discussion by throwing the dictionary at him/her is both rude and unhelpful.

The only way it shuts down the conversation is if they didn't have anything valid (such as a larger discussion about corporate influence in politics) to respond with. Given the actual response I got from the author, I don't feel particularly sorry that I came down a little harder than I usually do. At this point I can only assume that if they had more interesting, sourced, or nuanced points they would have brought them forth at that time. Instead we get more conflation of Eric Schmidt and Google, and the appeal "You think Google wasn't trying to influence the Obama white house during those 427 visits?", to which I think I've adequately explained my thinking here.

There are many useful conversations to be had about Google's influence on the government, and the referenced article actually does a good job of bringing them up, and providing a measured interpretation of what they mean, and why the pure numbers are not a smoking gun without context. That it's used in this way doesn't do it justice, nor does it do justice to those of us that might see numbers referenced from it without context in this way, which was to make an allusion such as "lots of visits equals bribery".