●Obama & Google (a love story)_自考|成考|专升本|高升专|高升本|在职研究生-学历教育网

wrote:

http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/21/technology/obama_google.fortune/专科

(Fortune Magazine) -- No one can accuse President Barack Obama of cozying up to corporate America.

From his denunciations of Wall Street greed to his critiques of the auto manufacturers, Obama and his team have done little to disguise their mistrust of big business -- except when it comes to one very large, very influential technology company.

In Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), the $22-billion-a-year online-advertising Goliath, Obama appears to have found a corporate kindred spirit. Google executives, led by CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are scary smart and supremely self-confident (much like the President himself), and despite their company's growing power, they depict themselves as advocates for consumers.

"What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not from the top down," Obama told Google employees during a 2007 visit to its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Indeed, two of Obama's economic tenets -- support for more U.S.-educated engineers and the expansion of Internet services to poor and rural areas -- grew out of a visit to Google headquarters in 2004, an encounter Obama recalls in his book "The Audacity of Hope."

Google managers and employees were some of the strongest supporters of candidate Obama, donating around $803,000 to his presidential campaign, according to the website OpenSecrets.org. Among corporate employees, only staffers at Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) and Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) gave more.

CEO Schmidt actively stumped for the candidate and served as an informal economic adviser during the campaign, and after Obama was elected, Schmidt and other Google executives forked over $25,000 apiece to help pay for the inaugural celebration.

Because the company and administration are so like-minded, it should come as no surprise that Google executives soon found themselves assuming roles in the Obama administration.

Nevertheless, Google's newfound access in Washington is striking for two reasons: Obama and his team pride themselves on maintaining a distance from corporations -- before taking office the President pledged to close the "revolving door" of industry executives who go on to regulate their former corporate peers.

Google, meanwhile, likes to portray its Washington operation as a quasi-academic resource that's above the political fray. Politicians and their staffers "are sometimes taken aback by the fact that we don't always act the way that other companies act," says Bob Boorstin, a former Clinton White House speechwriter who works on freedom of expression issues in Google's Washington, D.C., office. "What we offer is technological expertise ... It's a company that's a think tank, or a think tank that's a company."

Either Google is very naive about the way Washington works, or it thinks everyone else is.

Yet neither Obama's anticorporate leanings nor Google's anti-"politics as usual" culture has stopped the two camps from collaborating closely. Schmidt sits on Obama's Council of Science and Technology Advisers. Google employees acted as advisers to the Obama transition team -- in one case Google executive Sonal Shah actually led a meeting, to the surprise of at least one attendee -- and a handful of ex-Googlers have joined the administration in various roles.

The most visible appointee is Google's former head of global public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, who was named deputy chief technology officer in June. McLaughlin's appointment raised eyebrows -- in his previous role McLaughlin championed Google's policy goals. Now he'll be in a position to shape policy that affects Google's rivals. White House spokesman Nick Shapiro says McLaughlin's appointment complies with the letter and spirit of the ethics standards Obama imposes

wrote:

on his administration.

Google's ties to the White House might have gone largely unnoticed -- the roles, after all, are relatively low level, unlike the cabinet-level corporate folks in previous administrations -- if the stakes weren't so high: Founded just 11 years ago, Google has emerged as one of the most innovative and disruptive forces in global business, and it is looking to dominate across a range of technologies.

While it remains primarily a company that helps consumers find information on the web -- and gets 97% of its revenue from advertisers that pay to reach those consumers -- Google is quickly moving into entirely new and diverse operations ranging from telecommunications to digitizing books to distributing premium video content. Its technology verges on omnipresent: Its servers are constantly gathering, storing, discarding, and distributing information about consumers.

Google's expansion has the potential to accelerate its already remarkable growth. Last year revenue climbed 31% -- and amazingly, it has expanded its U.S. market share in online searches to a dominant 65%. Its stock price hovers around $550 a share, bolstered recently by record-setting third-quarter earnings.

0:00 /2:30Google execs top 40 under 40 list
But Google's ambitions rankle big competitors in the tech, media, and communications sectors, and privacy hawks are starting to fret about the company's growing market power and its Big Brother-like trove of information, which, left unchecked, could be used in all sorts of questionable ways. Google's foes, which include battle-hardened regulatory veterans such as AT&T (T, Fortune 500), haven't been shy about nudging their friends in Washington.

And so the company, once virtually invisible in Washington, now finds itself in the cross hairs of regulators and lawmakers. Its much-discussed effort to digitize books has sparked an investigation by the Justice Department's antitrust division over whether its plan to create a worldwide electronic library amounts to a monopolistic online land grab.

Similarly, the Federal Trade Commission, concerned over privacy issues, has begun reviewing behavioral advertising -- ads based on your recent online activity -- and some lawmakers want to regulate web ads. An upcoming battle over regulation of the Internet -- Google favors a policy that prohibits telecom providers and cable operators from interfering with any content that runs on those networks -- pitches the tech giant against the powerful lobbying arms of companies such as Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500) and Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500).

The various battles will surely test Google's kinship with Obama as politicians seek to monitor, discipline, and regulate the company. But for Google, the question isn't whether its ties to Obama will help shield the company from investigations and new rules (it probably won't: Consider that Obama's own appointee is leading the antitrust crusade).

Google's challenge in D.C. is to try to maintain its pro-consumer, unsullied "think tank" image as it enters into potentially hostile battles with regulators, lawmakers, and corporate lobbyists who are better staffed and more experienced in D.C.

"Google is still caught up in its self-identified uniqueness," says Rob Atkinson, a tech adviser to Obama's transition team who is also president of the nonpartisan Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington research institute. "But the cachet goes away the more it starts to act like a company. Google is a company and has company interests, and that is what Washington is all about."

Just four years ago Google had almost no presence in Washington. It had just one D.C.-based executive working on public policy. By 2008, however, the company had gotten religion: It unveiled new offices with room to grow, but with the bright colors and flat-panel televisions hung about the