Being Evil

The New America Foundation says it didn’t fire all 10 members of its Open Markets Program over a post critical of Google, which has given NAF more than $21 million. But all signs say otherwise. Which is one more reason to worry about the vast power of the Silicon Valley giants.

According to The New York Times, Google chairman Eric Schmidt vented his fury over the post to foundation head Anne-Marie Slaughter, who soon e-mailed unit chief Barry Lynn that his team was “imperiling the institution as a whole” and had to go.

Lynn’s post cheered the $2.7 billion fine that European anti-trust regulators imposed on the search-engine company for favoring its own services over rivals, as “protecting the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend.”

He urged “US enforcers” to “build upon this important precedent, both in respect to Google and to other dominant platform monopolists including Amazon,” citing “traditional American approach to network monopoly, which is to cleanly separate ownership of the network from ownership of the products and services sold on that network.”

Lynn (like New America as a whole) leans left, but plenty of righties and centrists share his concerns. This is an important argument to have, and just the sort of thing that a think tank like New America ought to promote.

Happily, Open Markets will continue as an independent outfit, chaired by New York uber-progressive Zephyr Teachout, who has belatedly noticed that Google spends vastly more on lobbying and on influencing thought than do the likes of the Koch brothers.

Google denies all wrongdoing here, and Slaughter says she ousted Lynn & Co. for failures in “collegiality.”

But it sure looks like she put her funding ahead of principle. Other donors should take note, and stop giving. New America can be an open arm of Google’s parent, Alphabet.

As for Google itself: What a long way it’s come from its “don’t be evil” days. The company has grown huge by distributing content it never created nor paid for — and now seems to be suppressing content it doesn’t like.

This, when all Silicon Valley is moving to not just share content, but “curate” it — that is, to decide what you’re likely to see on the Web.

If the New America episode is any indication, that means a smugly elitist left-liberalism that will happily bash the nation’s “deplorables” while staying silent about the monopolists who dominate the Internet.

If lefties like Teachout and Lynn are ready to confront that threat, they’ll find support all across the political spectrum.