Think tank funded by Google ousts a critic of the tech giant
WASHINGTON — In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a tech giant that shapes public policy debates with its enormous wealth is criticized.
The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left.
But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Schmidt communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.
Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Schmidt serves as executive chairman.
Slaughter told Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Slaughter to Lynn. The email suggested that the Open Markets team — 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.
While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by the New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Slaughter accused Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”
Lynn, in an interview, charged that Slaughter caved to pressure from Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.
“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”
Google rejected any suggestion that it played a role in New America’s split with Open Markets.
New America’s vice president, Tyra Mariani, said it was “a mutual decision for Barry to spin out his Open Markets program,” and that the move was not influenced by Google or Schmidt. Mariani said Google
is continuing to fund New America.
And after this article was published online Wednesday morning, Slaughter wrote on Twitter that it was “false.” She failed to cite any errors on Twitter or in a statement issued hours later through New America. Mariani did not respond to requests to identify errors or to make Slaughter available for an interview.
In the statement from New America, Slaughter announced that the think tank had fired Lynn on Wednesday for “his repeated refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality.”