Google’s been looking to influence the world even more than it has. According to a breaking investigation from Wall Street Journal story, the company has regularly pays professors at top universities — $5,000 to as much as $400,000 — to create research that bolster’s Google’s views to government regulators.
Influence is incredibly important in business. You want to affect decisions of customers, industry figures, government regulators, pundits, and others. It’s why companies will look for spokespeople to make their case. Or why they will hire social media influencers (even though they may have no influence) or run extensive PR campaigns.
Even startups have to make sure they’re heard, get their view across. The type of extensive funding of research that Google has undertaken may or may not be effective. The question is whether trying to influence public discourse, regulators, and others indirectly, particularly when your involvement isn’t necessarily disclosed, is a wise idea.
Google and some of the researchers told the Journal that there are no strings tied to funding. Academics are free to publish the research or analyses whether their findings would ultimately benefit Google or not. But not all the research the Journal looked at indicated that Google was associated with the study in any way, and there can be other interactions that raise questions:
Some researchers share their papers before publication and let Google give suggestions, according to thousands of pages of emails obtained by the Journal in public-records requests of more than a dozen university professors. The professors don’t always reveal Google’s backing in their research, and few disclosed the financial ties in subsequent articles on the same or similar topics, the Journal found.
Even though some professors said Google doesn’t control what they do, there’s still the potential appearance of impropriety.
This isn’t a new issue. The tobacco companies were notorious for this, for decades successfully battling the growing knowledge…