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by Aunche
1962 days ago
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Google has so much trouble rolling out Fiber. Bloomberg spent hundreds of millions on an election to little effect. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry supposed managed to buy a politician for $43,000. That implies that money isn't really the way into politics, not that politicians are easy to buy. Otherwise, it would be much more effective to spend money on politicians than million-dollar super-bowl ads. |
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I don't think they are so hard to buy, but the currency you need isn't $. It's votes. $ are only useful in so far as they are means of getting votes. The $ you give them doesn't go into their pockets, or at least not in places discovering a bribe means someone ends up in jail. So what it is used for? The only use I can see is to earn more votes, by advertising, databases of voters, party machines and the like.
Votes can be delivered in other ways. The media can choose to spin it's stories one way or the other, which gives them an inordinate amount of leverage. In a state that employs a lot of people in coal mining, an employer intimating "if you vote for X, you get to keep your job" can have much more sway that a measly $43k.
Google's problem is they are a capital intensive, high wage, and consequently employ bugger all people for each $ they turn over compared to low wage enterprises that employ a lot of minimum wage people. Also they don't editorialise, and they don't advertise, and they are geographically dispersed. If a coal mining corporation swings the votes of 1,000 employees they could change the outcome of an election, but Google, despite employing vastly more than 1,000 can't do that. That leaves two options - lobbying and $ donations, which as you observe aren't that effective.
What has just transpired in Australia is an excellent example of what happens when Google does find the will to flex some real political muscle. I wrote about it here [0], but put briefly the newspapers decided to use their waning political muscle to get the Australian politicians to force Google hand over money from the ad revenue they generate from search. The pretext was very weak, so weak they could not define the sorts of activities the newspapers must be paid for so the proposed legislation literally named Google and Facebook, and demand they hand over $ to the newspapers. Capitalist cronyism at it's best.
I guess the newspapers thought they could deliver votes and Google couldn't. The politicians definitely thought so, as they floated a draft bill and it was at it's second reading. But it crossed some line for Google, the line that normally stops them from editorialising on their digital properties. They publicly threatened to shut down search in Australia and ensured it was broadcasted on every news channel in Australia, they put a 1/2 page banner on they search page (something most Australians see at least once a day) saying the same thing. Australian's read the sub-text: all your gmail.com accounts and emails, all your Google contacts, all your Android photos and a whole lot else besides is under threat.
Or at least that's my reading of what happened. In any case last Friday which was only a few days after that, the Prime Minister announced Google was being much more reasonable. As far as I could tell, Google's position hadn't changed at all from 6 months ago and they hadn't donated a single extra $, but they had just demonstrated they could shift a lot of votes.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26043954