It has faced a well-financed campaign by Oracle, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Nokia and others against its European operations, plus a similar action driven by Yelp. It's been targeted in a lawsuit by AT&T over access to utility poles for Google Fiber.
Now, in what appears to be a new tactic on the technology industry battleground, Google has come under attack by a mysterious group that keeps mum about its sponsors while issuing scathing reports about the Mountain View search giant's influence on government. Among its recent revelations: High-ranking Google execs have had more than 20 "intimate" meetings with President Barack Obama, and the company has a revolving-door employment relationship with the federal government.
While the backers of the "Google Transparency Project" may be hidden, its purpose is clear, observers say: To offer purportedly objective research and commentary that can be used to thwart Google's burgeoning power in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, much as similar "think tanks" have sought to undermine the environmental lobby or promote development projects.
"When you're successful, you're on top of the hill. You become a target," said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who studies the technology industry.
Google, with a market capitalization of $529 billion, is a Goliath among Bay Area tech giants. It is known for disrupting industries around the world, from travel to media to transportation, making it enemy No. 1 for many competitors and leaving a trail of lawsuits in its wake. Oracle is still fighting to renew a failed $9 billion lawsuit accusing Google of stealing Oracle code to cash in on the Android mobile operating system.
Google and the Transparency Project both declined to comment.
So far, only Redwood Shores-based Oracle has admitted to funding the Transparency Project, telling Fortune it wanted the public to know about its support for the initiative. Oracle declined to comment to this newspaper. Other companies that have tangled with Google have denied involvement with the project, including AT&T, Yelp and Microsoft.
"This is an attempt to influence policy, essentially, to restrict the behavior of your competitor who you feel is either monopolistic or competing unfairly," Cusumano said.
American companies have long assailed competitors by sponsoring damaging research, but the Transparency Project's approach -- highly public attacks combined with profound secrecy about its backers -- is a new tactic in Silicon Valley tech, said Steve Blank, a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and prominent Silicon Valley observer.
"This is just a symptom of a much bigger game. What you want to do if you're a corporation is you want to influence policy for your interest," Blank said. "We're just like any other industry now. This is what this game has gotten down to in Silicon Valley because the stakes are big enough."
Just as there's nothing illegal about the activities that have put Google in the cross hairs of the Transparency Project -- lobbying, sponsoring research, and building close ties with U.S. officials -- the project's secrecy-shrouded attack-dog work also appears not to cross any legal lines.
"I don't see any of this as nefarious," said former U.S. Department of Justice chief economist Daniel Rubinfeld, an emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. "It's changing times. Companies are battling each other on many more fronts than they used to."
The Transparency Project commenced hostilities against Google in April, gaining national media attention with a report tracking the number of Googlers taking jobs in the White House and federal agencies, and the number of federal officials traveling in the other direction, into Google. Project researchers reported 113 "revolving door" moves between Google -- plus its associated companies, law firms and lobbyists -- and the White House and federal agencies.
"Over the past decade, Google has transformed itself from the dominant internet search engine into a global business empire that touches on almost every facet of people's lives -- often without their knowledge or consent," the group's first report said. "It scans the content of people's emails, tracks their activities online and their movements in the real world. It analyzes their search queries and behavior in ways many find troubling. At the same time, the company has assiduously courted Washington."
Another report, based on White House guest logs, cites 427 visits by employees of Google and "associated entities" to the White House since January 2009, with 21 "small, intimate" meetings between senior Google executives and Obama.
"Google executives have had extraordinary access to the White House meetings at which policies are set ... meetings encompassing a surprisingly wide range of topics including intellectual property, national security, government contracts, digital media strategy, antitrust, biotechnology, energy and climate change, broadband and telecommunications, foreign policy, health care, aerospace and aeronautics," the report said.
Another missive from the organization suggested that Google was influencing government policymakers on the sly by funding researchers who kept quiet about their ties to the company while promoting policies favorable to Google.
"Google-funded academics are playing an outsize role in the debate over the U.S. government's policy on internet privacy, a rapidly evolving area and an existential issue for Google," the report said. "They are also often at the epicenter of policy research on antitrust issues in the age of digital platforms, another issue in which Google has a major stake."
Google declined to comment on the project's critiques.
But none of the corporate behaviors described in the critical reports surprised UC Berkeley's Blank.
"Businesses will spend what's necessary to influence policy," Blank said. "It raises the larger issue of whether any industry people should have that level of influence. We've built what I call a deep-pockets democracy. If you have deep pockets you have more access (to government officials) than a nonprofit or somebody who's trying to represent Americans.
"What's not being represented by either Oracle or Google is the public interest."
However, Google's competitors stand to gain from the Transparency Project's spotlight on the firm's aggressive efforts to mold policy, Cusumano of MIT said. Government officials might be less likely to make or promote policies benefiting Google if they felt the company's influence was being monitored, Cusumano said.
"They might re-evaluate what they're doing or thinking of doing," Cusumano said.
For a group devoted to "transparency," the Google project's origins are obscure. It is run by the nonprofit Campaign for Accountability, a group that says it is dedicated to exposing government and corporate malfeasance and which started as an offshoot of the deep-pocketed New Venture Fund.
The New Venture Fund is heavily supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. A Gates Foundation spokeswoman did not provide an answer when asked whether the foundation was aware of the venture fund's work on the Google Transparency Project. The Hewlett Foundation said none of its donations went to the project.
The Campaign for Accountability does not publicly reveal its connection to the venture fund -- in fact its deputy director claimed to this newspaper in July that it was not a project of NVF, despite this newspaper having donated $1 to the campaign and received a tax receipt from the fund in return. However, the fund's president later admitted it did run the Campaign, but said it was spinning it off into a new organization called Hopewell Fund.
Among Hopewell's three directors is Michael Slaby, who appears to be the same man who was an election-campaign-technology guru behind Obama's two successful runs, and whose campaign-tech platform The Groundwork is being used by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
In a bizarre and quite possibly coincidental twist, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is reportedly the main investor in The Groundwork, raising the puzzling specter of the influential and respected Googler funding the work of a man whose side project is attacking Google. Google declined to provide access to Schmidt, who is now executive chairman of Google parent Alphabet, and Slaby did not respond to interview requests.
©2016 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
