[spindritf]

How so? Is Google requiring all your connections to go through their servers?

Are they hiding some important information from you, maybe Ghostery is not showing up in your search results? Perhaps they provide a browser that you have to use in which you cannot install Adblock, or stop it from accepting third party cookies?

[millstone]

You may recall Google being fined $22.5 million for sneakily bypassing Safari's privacy settings earlier this year.

But more to the point is Google's lobbying. Google spends far more on lobbying than do Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft. Google is required to report which issues they lobbied on, but not whether they are for or against proposed legislation.

In some cases we can speculate. Google reports high spending on the "Global Online Freedom Act of 2011," which would make it a crime for companies to cooperate with foreign government (cough China) censorship. I do not know which way Google lobbied on this bill, because they won't say (which is itself suggestive). But I suspect they lobbied against it, i.e. would like to be able to censor, because it seems strange to spend so much money supporting a bill that could criminalize their behavior and make it more difficult for them to grow in China. So there is a potential example of Google defending censorship when it aligns with their interest.

Overall, it's a fair guess that their lobbying efforts are for less Internet regulation, and also less consumer privacy protections, because that's where their financial interests lie.

[csoghoian]

Google was fined for violating its consent order with the FTC (established after the Buzz fiasco) in which it agreed to not lie to consumers about the extent to which they can opt out of Google's tracking.

The fine here was for lying to Safari users (Google told them they didn't need to opt out, because they couldn't be tracked, when in fact the company was tracking them).

The $22.5 million fine was _not_ for the covert tracking itself.

[AnthonyMouse]

That sort of speculation is not productive. We could just as easily speculate that Google would prefer not to censor in foreign countries and is advocating the legislation to provide them an excuse to foreign governments for their refusal to censor, and to prevent their competitors from gaining an advantage in such countries by capitulating to censorship demands and thereby putting unwanted pressure on Google to do the same.