Just as tobacco companies skewed research in the 1950s to downplay smoking risks, Big Tech companies are tainting research and independent experts to weaken antitrust enforcement.
That’s according to the nation’s top antitrust enforcer, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Jonathan Kanter.
Kanter took a break from prosecuting Google last week to deliver this broadside at an antitrust conference hosted by Fordham University’s law school.
After noting the Department of Justice’s momentum in competition cases, including a verdict that Google monopolizes online search, Kanter took aim at tech companies and experts taking their money directly or indirectly.
The inevitable result is “to distort the academic dialogue and reshape expertise into advocacy,” he said, according to a transcript posted by the DOJ.
“All over the world, money earmarked specifically to discourage antitrust and competition law enforcement is finding its way into the expert community upon which we all depend,” he said.
This isn’t surprising to anyone closely following tech companies’ aggressive efforts to avoid paying for news content benefiting their platforms.
Hearings in Congress and legislatures over such policies are packed with skeptical testimony from academics and organizations allied with the companies, with strings rarely disclosed or reported.
Kanter said this phenomenon is extensive and corrosive to dialogue, academia and government decision-making.
Competition regulators depend on outside experts, including the legal and economic communities, for research and “the building blocks of their analyses.”
“But if a paper was shadow-funded or influenced by corporate money, it can pass that influence and whatever flaws or biases it introduced into the papers that build on it,” he said. “This insidious ripple effect is difficult — if not nearly impossible — to detect.”
Kanter described how this influencing is eroding trust in the integrity and independence of academia forged over generations. It also compromises the impartial expertise that government decision-makers need.
“The world is a murky enough place,” he said. “We believe in an independent academic dialogue as a critical element of seeking and finding truth. And as markets evolve, we need that in order to get competition policy right.”
Advocacy is also important, Kanter added. His issue is with “the more insidious influence that flows from the blurring of lines between advocacy and expertise.”
Kanter suggested that the international antitrust community “build a consensus around how to address the problem of paid influence in our expert community.”
“We can engage candidly with the expert community to better understand and define effective rules, disclosures and prohibitions against conflicts of interest,” he said.
The DOJ’s latest case against Google, over its dominance of online advertising technology, is built in part on evidence that the company’s anti-competitive behavior harmed publishers.
That skewed market has made it difficult for newspapers to build sustainable, online businesses. Their newsrooms shrank by two-thirds over the last two decades as Google cemented its dominance of the gateway to information online.
The news industry should do more to investigate and flag conflicts of interest and connections between experts, advocacy organizations and the powerful entities using them to influence policy.
But in their diminished state, with fewer reporters and competing priorities for remaining staff time, many news organizations spend less time following the money and reporting who pays these influencers and why.
I’m glad Kanter’s calling this out and starting a conversation within the competition-law community.
I hope this also prompts discussion in journalism, academia and other places where trust is lost when there’s not clear differentiation between experts and advocates.
That’s needed regardless of what happens in the Google cases and policymaking to help save local journalism.
Why journalists stay: A new study, highlighted at NiemanLab, looks at why journalists remain in their jobs despite the economic uncertainty, low pay and hostility they may encounter. The grim side is offset by joy that emerges through doing the service-oriented job, researchers at universities in Florida and Chile found.
“In this way, joy in journalism is not only experienced, but also summoned by journalists as a means to bring light to even the darkest moments of journalistic work,” they wrote.
Street pricing Google breakup: The government is a long way from breaking up Google through antitrust enforcement. But “investors are starting to treat the possibility as a foregone conclusion,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
It noted that Google parent Alphabet’s stock is down nearly 14% since the start of the quarter, notably worse than the concurrent decline in other major tech stocks, and quotes several analysts expecting Google to pay a heavy price for its anti-competitive business practices.
Fallen Journalists Memorial design: The foundation working to build a memorial to fallen journalists in Washington, D.C., unveiled design renderings, The Washington Post reports. They show stacked glass prisms (“shedding light”) forming a circular space featuring a “lens” placed in the ground, and inscribed with the First Amendment text protecting the freedom of the press.
This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.
