@SnappleBC

It ain't just TPTB, but any hacker, who can do this sort of thing. I now have 13 locked, password-protected files which a Kaspersky free scan can't access to check but mentions to me and a lot of increasingly weird stuff going on in a computer I'll never be able to afford to replace.

Without the PTB-installed vulnerabilities placing us all at risk, hackers would not be having quite such a field day as they're now having, and my one personal consolation is that I have no money that anyone can steal from me through it. They are, however, pissing me off, especially since for all I know, this computer might be slaved to botnets used for attacking possibly progressive sites, or for anything else. As one of the technologically challenged, I have no way of finding out.

#4.1 That'll be a protocol I need to disable. As the article points out, it's not so much that they can deliver encrypted video. They could already do that. Now the problem is that "they" (anyone really) can deliver anything to my computer and the payload is encrypted and potentially unchangeable by me.

I'm not all that worried about it in the long-term. If TPTB want to try to stop the flow of information in the information age then they can rock on. Me? I'm going with that old adage, "The internet routes around damage." Something like this would be treated as damage and be routed around. Sure, the masses will probably get infected by malware from the NSA but then they probably already are.

Overall it's just more of the corporatocracy in action. All one need do is look at who's interests are served in order to understand who the constituents are.

@SnappleBC

Dunno if this helps? It's old, from 2015 - my searches for some time now have tended to produce only old material in 'sensitive' areas. (Have both variable connection and computer issues as well, making even the most basic research damn near impossible, apart from health issues often making me very tired and absent-minded. So I often can't find results which were once easily found.) But it's a great general, non-technical explanation for dummies like myself of how such as Panda works - and best read at source, if possible.

(I did find something directly from the horse's ass, below this, although only via a link.)

(Emphasis mine.)
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/04/google-judges-quality/

By Neil Patel published April 9, 2015
Content Strategy / SEO
How Google Judges Quality and What You Should Do About It

Every content marketing professional has something to say about “quality.” The word has become so used – or overused – that we’ve forgotten what it is, or even why it’s important.

I think we need to press the reset button on the quality discussion. Why? Because many content marketers:

Mistake what quality is
Focus on the wrong kind of quality
Misunderstand why they are producing quality content
Do not produce quality content at all ...

...Google only ranks your site if it has high-quality content.

I took time with those statistics because I wanted to lead up to the clincher.

Google will only give you search traffic if you have high-quality content.

Yes, Google is vast. Yes, the highest percentage of your visits comes from Google. But you don’t get this traffic just by existing. You get it by producing high-quality content.

There is no other way. That point is the subject of the rest of this article.

Here are the questions I want to answer:

How do we know that Google wants high-quality content?
How can my site have this kind of great quality content?

How does Google show its preference for quality content?

Google Webmaster guidelines deal with the importance of quality content.

The first and most obvious way that Google insists on quality content is by telling us it’s so. Webmaster Tools is full of information that insists on valuable content.

Google even created a course for it. ...

... Google employs human raters who analyze sites for quality, and thus adjust the algorithm to identify high- and low-quality features.

It is widely known among the search community that Google has a document known as the Quality Rater Guidelines. This document, which has been leaked numerous times, essentially discusses the features of good quality and poor quality. The document is not significant in its detail as much as in its overall message.

The message is this: Google cares about high-quality content. It cares enough to employ a small army of raters who can identify quality and report their findings to Google.

Here are the broad features and recommendations of the Quality Rater Guidelines that can help you create higher quality content: ...

...Interact with other relevant and authoritative sources. In keeping with co-citation and co-occurrence best practices, make sure that you reference any authoritative sources and draw upon other recognized resources. ...

Google’s algorithm updates reflect the importance of content.

Google’s much-famed algorithm updates are designed to improve the search engine’s ability to rank sites. But which sites get higher rankings? And which sites get ranked lower? And why?

The formula takes into consideration a huge variety of factors, but one of the biggest ones is content. The name of this algorithm update is Panda.

Google has had more Panda updates than any other publicly known updates. As of early 2015, there are 27 Panda updates on record. The most recent major Panda update happened in September 2014. ...

...Panda is, technically speaking, a search filter. It first appeared in February 2011. The entire point of the filter is to downgrade the search rankings of sites that have low-quality content.

The Panda features are broad and varied, but here are some of the main things that Panda attempts to weed out:

Duplicate content – content that appears on more than one page (Content needs to be unique.)
Automatically generated content
Affiliate pages that don’t actually say anything substantial
Doorway pages
Scraped content
Some guest posts
Unauthoritative content – content that does not augment the general knowledge on a given topic
Content stuffed with keywords

Is your site a victim of Panda’s updates? Check out this flowchart, and see if anything stands out.

The fact that Google has updated Panda so many times indicates how important it considers high-quality content to be. ...

...Google penalizes low-quality content

How important is quality, really? It’s important enough to warrant a lot of time, attention, and effort on your part. Many webmasters have war stories of Panda updates. Some of these Panda tragedies obliterated virtually all of a site’s organic traffic.

This site, for example, experienced a blow-after-blow attack from Panda’s updates, spanning nearly a year and a half. ...

...In its guidelines, Google makes it clear that it will take manual action against sites that are not in compliance with its guidelines.
Practical takeaways for creating high-quality content

The issue of quality is so huge that you could read hundreds of articles and still not exhaust the subject. It’s also an unwieldy subject. Quality can affect details as minute as kerning, and fuzzy issues like authority. How do you wrap your mind around it? ...

...Conclusion

Everyone likes to talk about content being king, and the importance of quality content. It’s time that we truly understand what it means to have quality content.

How do you define quality content?

The discussion about quality – and more importantly how to improve it – never ends. Be part of the conversation and the lessons learned at Content Marketing World 2015 this September. Register today.

And this propagandist claim of the neos to be 'liberals', (which fools many, regardless of their personal political indoctrination) is disgusting, as they are clearly the antithesis of liberal, and yet they sully such terms by association with their appalling agendas to confuse essential issues in their divide and conquer strategies.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/google-responds-to-report-claiming-sea...

Google Responds to Report Claiming Search Results Are Biased Against Conservative Sites

By Samuel Smith , CP Reporter | Sep 19, 2017

...In April, Google announced that it was taking new steps to combat "fake news" with "Search Quality Rater guidelines."

"Last month, we updated our Search Quality Rater Guidelines to provide more detailed examples of low-quality webpages for raters to appropriately flag, which can include misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories," Google explained. "These guidelines will begin to help our algorithms in demoting such low-quality content and help us to make additional improvements over time."

Bolyard notes that there are some unknowns with Google's new Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

"Who are these 'real people' Google is using as evaluators? We're not told. And what's their definition of an 'offensive result'? We don't know that either," she explained. "But in light of Google's history (firing an employee who ran afoul of the company's [liberal] orthodoxy, working with left-wing groups to root out and threaten 'hate' sites on the internet, and blacklisting sites they find to be objectionable) there's probably not a high likelihood that these people lean conservative — or even moderate. That doesn't bode well for conservative sites going forward."

Bolyard concludes: "Knowing what we do about the liberal leanings of Google executives and employees, the possibility of bias being incorporated into the search algorithms cannot be ruled out. Algorithms, in the end, only do what the human programmers tell them to do." ...

Meanwhile, actual liberals - often lumped in by the PR people/neos/paid trolls with the 'vast right-wing conspiracy against Clinton', as Bernie supporters so volubly were accused of being part of, because that all-purpose PR tactic is there to be used - are spitting blood (and losing site traffic/ad funding/general consumer useful search ability - and any use for Google) over all this, while misled conservatives are led to think that such as this is a 'liberal' thing actual liberals'd support for a freaking instant - just to make certain that people are busy fighting each other over what's being done to them all by these propagandists and thereby prevented from coming together against it all.

The above links to what I couldn't find in DuckDuckGo search - one of the pertinent official Google statements:

(Emphasis mine)
https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-improvements-...

Our latest quality improvements for Search

Ben Gomes
VP, Engineering
Published Apr 25, 2017

... Today, in a world where tens of thousands of pages are coming online every minute of every day, there are new ways that people try to game the system. The most high profile of these issues is the phenomenon of “fake news,” where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information. While this problem is different from issues in the past, our goal remains the same—to provide people with access to relevant information from the most reliable sources available. And while we may not always get it right, we’re making good progress in tackling the problem. But in order to have long-term and impactful changes, more structural changes in Search are needed.

With that longer-term effort in mind, today we’re taking the next step toward continuing to surface more high-quality content from the web. This includes improvements in Search ranking, easier ways for people to provide direct feedback, and greater transparency around how Search works.

Search ranking
Our algorithms help identify reliable sources from the hundreds of billions of pages in our index. However, it’s become very apparent that a small set of queries in our daily traffic (around 0.25 percent), have been returning offensive or clearly misleading content, which is not what people are looking for. To help prevent the spread of such content for this subset of queries, we’ve improved our evaluation methods and made algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content.

New Search Quality Rater guidelines: Developing changes to Search involves a process of experimentation. As part of that process, we have evaluators—real people who assess the quality of Google’s search results—give us feedback on our experiments. These ratings don’t determine individual page rankings, but are used to help us gather data on the quality of our results and identify areas where we need to improve. Last month, we updated our Search Quality Rater Guidelines to provide more detailed examples of low-quality webpages for raters to appropriately flag, which can include misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories. These guidelines will begin to help our algorithms in demoting such low-quality content and help us to make additional improvements over time.
Ranking changes: We combine hundreds of signals to determine which results we show for a given query—from the freshness of the content, to the number of times your search queries appear on the page. We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content, so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we saw back in December are less likely to appear.

Direct feedback tools
When you visit Google, we aim to speed up your experience with features like Autocomplete, which helps predict the searches you might be typing to quickly get to the info you need, and Featured Snippets, which shows a highlight of the information relevant to what you’re looking for at the top of your search results. The content that appears in these features is generated algorithmically and is a reflection of what people are searching for and what’s available on the web. This can sometimes lead to results that are unexpected, inaccurate or offensive. Starting today, we’re making it much easier for people to directly flag content that appears in both Autocomplete predictions and Featured Snippets. These new feedback mechanisms include clearly labeled categories so you can inform us directly if you find sensitive or unhelpful content. We plan to use this feedback to help improve our algorithms.

I'm guessing that the tactic specified in the following piece will not just be used on FB and Youtube?

This part in the following is particularly, if grimly, amusing: '...Just this past weekend, a fake news link rose to the top of Google search results for the question “who won the popular vote,” falsely claiming the answer to be President-elect Donald Trump. ...' as this suppression of all but the Party lines is purportedly being instituted in regard to voters supposedly influenced away from voting for Clinton, while claiming that Her not being recognized on some site as having won the popular vote is an example of the reason for this...

But then the Russians!!! must have hacked!!! the Electoral College which gave Trump the Presidency - and yet they seem to be virtually the only ones not being accused of being one of the myriad causes of Her losing Her Royal Coronation?

Yup, this level of mental acuity and ability to recognize logic/reality certainly explains the way that the Psychopaths and Parasites That Be are killing the global economy, civilization and planetary life ASAP to briefly hold all of the data-dot wealth that will be worthless - and promptly vanish without a likely then-destroyed/deteriorating power supply/electronic tech - without what they're destroying to get it to play Monopoly with, assuming that the banksters don't eliminate paper money, the better to easily steal it all from everyone else.

(Emphasis mine)
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/14/13630722/google-fake-news-advertisin...

Google will soon ban fake news sites from using its ad network
44 comments
Cutting off their revenue streams
by Nick Statt@nickstatt Nov 14, 2016

... Today, Google announced that its advertising tools will soon be closed to websites that promote fake news, a policy that could cut off revenue streams for publications that peddle hoaxes on platforms like Facebook. The decision comes at a critical time for the tech industry, whose key players have come under fire for not taking neccesary steps to prevent fake news from proliferating across the web during the 2016 US election. It’s thought that, given the viral aspects of fake news, social networks and search engines were gamed by partisan bad actors intending to influence the outcome of the race.
"Fake news easily goes viral, and Silicon Valley is letting it happen unabated"

"Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property," a Google spokesperson said in a statement given to Reuters. This policy includes fake news sites, the spokesperson confirmed. Google already prevents its AdSense program from being used by sites that promote violent videos and imagery, pornography, and hate speech.

The issue of fake news on social media grabbed national attention earlier this summer, when Gizmodo reported that the team at Facebook responsible for its Trending Topics news list was suppressing links from conservative sources. The controversy called into question Facebook’s role as a primary source of news for tens of millions of Americans. The episode reportedley “paralyzed” Facebook, according to a recent report from The New York Times, leaving its leadership unwilling to make any drastic changes to the News Feed to curb the viral growth of fake news. ...

...Google appears to be taking a more active role, and for good reason. Just this past weekend, a fake news link rose to the top of Google search results for the question “who won the popular vote,” falsely claiming the answer to be President-elect Donald Trump. Now, it seems those sites that have learned to game the search and social network algorithms of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies may lose a crucial source of funding going forward.

The article below has a video which didn't run very well for me, probably due to my computer/connection issues. Have copied much of the transcript to be sure that people can see this.
(The Google Singularity under development and spoken of below is supposed to know what you're thinking even before you do, so that Thought Crimes also become a possibility, btw. Whether you might have been thinking at all, or not, since I gather we're not supposed to - just absorb and regurgitate what we're told by our 'betters'. The Singularity will doubtless assume that it's right in any case, much like the Psychopaths That Be and those programming for them. With no repercussions possible, what difference would it make, at that point, who else was randomly arrested/droned/whatever?)

https://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/8/google_in_the_white_house_assange

Google in the White House? Assange Warns of Close Ties Between Hillary Clinton & Internet Giant
StoryAugust 08, 2016

Topics

2016 Election
Julian Assange
Lockheed Martin

Guests

Julian Assange

founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

During the Green Party convention in Houston, Texas, over the weekend, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke via video stream about his book "When Google Met WikiLeaks" and the relationship between Hillary Clinton, the State Department and the internet giant Google.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

DAVID COBB: I’m reminded of the great political philosopher Lily Tomlin, who said, "No matter how cynical I get, it’s hard to keep up." Julian, Greens, like most Americans, are disgusted by the collusion between Wall Street, multinational corporations and our own government. We know, as most Americans do, that these large corporations are no longer merely exercising power, they are literally ruling over us. In your book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, you describe, quote, "a special relationship," end-quote, between Google, the U.S. State Department and Hillary Clinton. Could you talk about that, please? ...

...(JULIAN ASSANGE:)

... The chairman of Google, who was the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has started, about a year ago, a company to run Hillary Clinton’s digital campaign. Google has been to the White House, on average over the last four years, once per week—more than any other single company. It spends more money lobbying Washington, D.C., than any other single company. Hillary Clinton’s former staffer, Jared Cohen, was hired by Google in 2009 to head up Google’s internal think tank. There’s a lot of other interconnections between Google and the state. Eric Schmidt is now also, at the same time as being chairman of what is now Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is chairman of the Pentagon innovation board.

So you have a connection between Google, the Clinton campaign, which will be almost certainly the next White House, and the Pentagon. And this triangle is extremely worrying, because, as time goes by, Google is understanding that it does have an ability to influence election campaigns. It’s also bought more than 10 drone companies. It’s integrating its mapping data in order to better be able to fly and navigate drones around the world, is expanding into every country in the world.

And it has a very strange, quasi-religious vision of the future, of this vision of the singularity. It’s really a—I’ve done research that it’s very disturbing what they believe in Silicon Valley, that they believe they can create a massive artificial intelligence, more powerful than any human being or any society’s ability to think. And, of course, we all know what happens when such power is in limited hands.

And so, Google in the White House will be, essentially, an unregulatable company. It’s a question whether it’s already unregulatable, but you can—you can just completely forget about any kind of antitrust legislation being used on Google if there is a Hillary Clinton White House.

DAVID COBB: Julian, I’m reminded that Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator, said that fascism more appropriately should be called corporatism, because it merges the private power of corporations with the military might of the nation-state. And, of course, he thought that was a good thing. It occurs to me that you were describing our newer, kinder, gentler, smiling face of fascism, where all of the information that we receive is controlled by that same collusion between government and major transnational corporations, and now our ability to even talk to myself, or ourselves. Am I being overdramatic, or do I understand you correctly?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it could be both. It could be both. No, it is—it is possibly the most serious issue. The potential threat of nuclear war, I think, is perhaps the other one. Yes, there is a merger going on at a rapid pace between the largest American corporations and the traditional aspects of the U.S. state, the military intelligence aspects. I mean, that’s been there for a long time, frankly, with Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, General Electric, etc. But this is a new generation. And Eric Schmidt wrote in his book about Google and the world that what Lockheed Martin and other aerospace companies were to the 20th century, high-tech companies will be to the 21st century. And that’s very much their vision, to integrate with Washington, to prevent antitrust regulation and to be part of that family of traditional D.C.-mediated power.

DAVID COBB: Julian, Greens, like most Americans, have been horrified to learn—and, for many of us, have it objectively collaborated—that multinational corporations and wealthy oligarchs are literally directing U.S. foreign policy. So I have a question for you, because of your unique vantage point: What advice, if any, would you give the next president of the United States about how to shift that policy, given the reality that she might be facing?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, that’s a very interesting question. Does it make any difference who is president or not? A very, very interesting question. It certainly doesn’t make as much difference as people say. What really makes a difference is what the environment is in which the president has to work. And that is the environment of critique, on the one hand, to how free the media is, how much opposition organizations are doing their job in holding government to account. And it’s the economic and corporate environment, and then, to a degree, the international foreign affairs environment. And the president is much more a spokesperson for these forces around them.

Where they do make a big difference is in their initial appointments, so the people that they choose to fill those spots in government that then reactively makes policy. But as you can see with Barack Obama, most of the time is spent reading out teleprompters. There’s just not enough time to do much else than be a spokesperson for these groups. So, what is happening now, with the Green Party and Gary Johnson and the Bernie Sanders campaign and so on, is very, very important, but it must be seen past the moment, past this political moment. That’s a moment to build a movement and build pressure. And having built it, then one can discipline and hold to account and check the abuses of government during the next four years. ...

I'm copying a lot of this because it's essential background and I do know that following links can be difficult/impossible for some, depending on circumstances.)

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationshi...

The Android Administration

Google's remarkably close relationship with the Obama White House, in two charts

David Dayen

April 22 2016

Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects.

Precisely how much influence this buys Google isn’t always clear. But consider that over in the European Union, Google is now facing two major antitrust charges for abusing its dominance in mobile operating systems and search. By contrast, in the U.S., a strong case to sanction Google was quashed by a presidentially appointed commission.

It’s a relationship that bears watching. “Americans know surprisingly little about what Google wants and gets from our government,” said Anne Weismann, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog organization. Seeking to change that, Weismann’s group is spearheading a data transparency project about Google’s interactions in Washington.

The Intercept teamed up with Campaign for Accountability to present two revealing data sets from that forthcoming project: one on the number of White House meetings attended by Google representatives, and the second on the revolving door between Google and the government.

As the interactive charts accompanying this article show, Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.

No other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government. According to an analysis of White House data, the Google lobbyist with the most White House visits, Johanna Shelton, visited 128 times, far more often than lead representatives of the other top-lobbying companies — and more than twice as often, for instance, as Microsoft’s Fred Humphries or Comcast’s David Cohen. (The accompanying chart reflects 94 Shelton visits; it excludes large gatherings such as state dinners and White House tours.)

The information, Weismann said, “will help the public learn more about the company’s influence on our government, our policies, and our lives.” ...

...Google’s dramatic rise as a lobbying force has not gone unnoticed. The company paid almost no attention to the Washington influence game prior to 2007, but ramped up steeply thereafter. It spent $16.7 million in lobbying in 2015, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and has been at or near the top of public companies in lobbying expenses since 2012.

But direct expenditures on lobbying represent only one part of the larger influence-peddling game. Google’s lobbying strategy also includes throwing lavish D.C. parties; making grants to trade groups, advocacy organizations, and think tanks; offering free services and training to campaigns, congressional offices, and journalists; and using academics as validators for the company’s public policy positions. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was an enthusiastic supporter of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns and has been a major Democratic donor.

For its part, the Obama administration — attempting to project a brand of innovative, post-partisan problem-solving of issues that have bedeviled government for decades — has welcomed and even come to depend upon its association with one of America’s largest tech companies.

Google doesn’t just lobby the White House for favors, but collaborates with officials, effectively serving as a sort of corporate extension of government operations in the digital era. ...

...Practically every part of the government makes available some form of technology, whether it’s the public-facing website for a federal agency, a digital mechanism for people to access benefits, or a new communications tool for espionage or war.

Somebody has to build and manage those projects, and Silicon Valley firms have the expertise needed to do that. White House officials have publicly asked Silicon Valley for aid in stopping terrorists from recruiting via social media, securing the internet of things, thwarting cyberattacks, modernizing the Defense Department, and generally updating all their technology. We can reasonably expect yet more things are being asked for behind closed doors. ...

...Meetings between Google and the White House, viewed in this context, sometimes function like calls to the IT Help Desk. Only instead of working for the same company, the government is supposed to be regulating Google as a private business, not continually asking it for favors. ...

... Another potential conflict arises from the enormous amount of data that Google and the government each have stored on American citizens. Google recently acknowledged having mined the data of student users of its education apps, and has been accused repeatedly of violating user privacy in other contexts. An overly close partnership risks Google putting its data in the government’s hands or gaining access to what the government has collected.

When the federal government and a private company share the same worldview, get the same insights from the same groups of people, the policy drift can occur with nobody explicitly choosing the direction. It just seems like the right thing to do.

And there is no doubt that Google’s rise in Washington has coincided with public policy that is friendlier to the company.

Most notably, Google has faced questions for years about exercising its market power to squash rivals, infringing on its users’ privacy rights, favoring its own business affiliates in search results, and using patent law to create barriers to competition. Even Republican senators like Orrin Hatch have called out Google for its practices.

In 2012, staff at the Federal Trade Commission recommended filing antitrust charges after determining that Google was engaging in anti-competitive tactics and abusing its monopoly. A staff report that was later leaked said Google’s conduct “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets.”

The Wall Street Journal noted that Google’s White House visits increased right around that time. And in 2013, the presidentially appointed commissioners of the FTC overrode their staff, voting unanimously not to file any charges.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said the administration “has been a huge help” to Google both by protecting it from attempts to limit its market power and by blocking privacy legislation. “Google has been able to thwart regulatory scrutiny in terms of anti-competitive practices, and has played a key role in ensuring that the United States doesn’t protect at all the privacy of its citizens and its consumers,” Chester said.

At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, citing the possibility of consumer harm, called on the FTC to reconsider the kind of antitrust charges against Google recently filed in Europe.

But Obama has argued that European regulators are being too aggressive toward Google out of a desire to protect companies that aren’t as capable. “In defense of Google and Facebook, sometimes the European response here is more commercially driven than anything else,” he told Re/code in February. “We have owned the internet. Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it, in ways they can’t compete.” ...

...he accompanying visualization documents White House meetings involving employees from Google, Eric Schmidt’s investment vehicle Tomorrow Ventures, and Civis Analytics, a company whose sole investor is Schmidt.

Between January 2009 and October 2015, Google staffers gathered at the White House on 427 separate occasions. All told, 182 White House employees and 169 Google employees attended the meetings, with participation from almost every domestic policy and national security player in the West Wing.

The frequency of the meetings has increased practically every year, from 32 in 2009 to 97 in 2014. In the first 10 months of 2015, which is as far as the study goes, there were 85 Google meetings.

The most frequent visitor is Johanna Shelton, one of Google’s top lobbyists in Washington — officially its director of public policy. Shelton attended meetings at the White House on 94 different occasions.

The most Google-visited White House official is Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer from 2012 to 2014. In that short period, Park met with Google officials at the White House 22 times. Park’s replacement, current Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, was a former Google vice president. She had five White House meetings as a Google representative, then 10 Google meetings as a White House representative.

The comprehensiveness of Google’s outreach jumps out from the data. You would expect some contact between Google and top technology policymakers like Park, Smith, Aneesh Chopra, Susan Crawford, and Vivek Kundra. But Google’s presence as an economic force and a communications tool gives the company an interest in virtually every aspect of public policy.

Since 2009, Google has met with all three of Obama’s directors of the National Economic Council (Larry Summers, Gene Sperling, and Jeffrey Zients), one chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (Austan Goolsbee), and another official who would become CEA chair (Jason Furman, who was then deputy director of the NEC).

Company employees met with four Obama chiefs of staff (Rahm Emanuel, William Daley, Jack Lew, and Denis McDonough). Google also huddled with national security personnel like Michael McFaul (then at the NSC, later U.S. ambassador to Russia) and Tony Blinken (deputy national security adviser). Employees met with Heather Zichal, deputy assistant for energy and climate change, and White House science adviser John Holdren. They met with close counselors to the president like Pete Rouse, Valerie Jarrett, John Podesta, and Dan Pfeiffer. They met with then-communications director Jennifer Palmieri. And they met with the president of the United States 21 separate times — five times in the first term and 16 times in the first two-plus years of the second term. Even Jill Biden and Michelle Obama have taken meetings with Google employees. ...

...The “revolving door” data, displayed in the above visualization, reveals 55 cases of individuals moving from positions at Google into the federal government, and 197 individuals moving from positions inside the government to jobs at Google. The data includes positions at firms that Eric Schmidt owns or controls — Civis Analytics, The Groundwork, and Tomorrow Ventures — along with two law firms and three lobbying firms that have represented Google. On the government side, staffers at Obama for America and a handful of other political campaigns were included.

The data includes individuals from Google appointed to government boards while maintaining their positions at the tech firm. Google board member John Doerr was appointed to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in February 2011. Eric Schmidt has been part of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology since 2009. He was also more recently appointed to lead the Defense Innovation Advisory Board at the Pentagon, which occurred outside the time frame of the data.

But the bulk of the moves involved job changes. Google alums work in the departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Education, Justice, and Veterans Affairs. One works at the Federal Reserve, another at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The highest number — 29 — moved from Google into the White House. The State Department had the next highest with just five. The moves from Google to government got more frequent in the later Obama years; 11 occurred in 2014 and 16 in 2015, after only 18 in the entire first term.

On the other side, former staffers from 36 different areas across the government have found a willing employer at Google since 2009. Johanna Shelton was a senior counsel on the House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications Subcommittee. Joshua Wright, a former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, rotated into a top position at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, one of the law firms that has represented Google.

Nineteen researchers and scientists at NASA, senior analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an “information assurance expert” at the National Security Agency, and 32 separate officials with the Obama for America campaign found their way to Google.

Former employees of 12 of the 15 cabinet agencies (Energy, Justice, Defense, Education, State, Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, HHS, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs) now work at the tech company or its affiliates, led by 16 former Pentagon staffers. The exodus ramped up in the second term, hitting 41 in 2014, compared to just six in 2009.

Seven individuals made a full revolution through the revolving door, either going from Google to government and back again, or from government to Google and back again. This includes Julia Duncan, who left her job as White House personnel officer to go work in Google’s finance department in 2013, and a year later moved to the State Department’s Office of Food Security.

Nathan Parker, a staff software engineer at Google, did a stint in the U.S. Digital Service for four months before returning to Google HQ in Mountain View. Austin Lau was a planner and tech lead for Google India, then became a foreign service officer at the State Department before returning to Google to work on social impact partnerships.

A few individuals are listed twice: The aforementioned Mikey Dickerson moved from Google to the Obama campaign, back to Google, and then to the U.S. Digital Service, for example.

The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership.

Ex-Google staffers may not be directly involved in setting policy that affects Google, but they have access to decision-makers. They maintain ties to their former bosses. And Google employees with government experience have a network of friends and colleagues at federal agencies, House and Senate offices, the West Wing, and practically everywhere else.

Methodology:

The chart depicting White House visits is based on meetings between White House officials and employees of Google or companies controlled by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company, since President Obama took office in 2009 through October 2015. The data has been compiled from White House visitor records.

Large gatherings, such as state dinners and White House tours were excluded. Names were cross-referenced with lists of Google employees.

The jobs visualization was compiled from publicly available information including LinkedIn profiles, news sources, lobby disclosure records, and OpenSecrets.org data. Analysts gathered data by searching for profiles mentioning Google and terms related to government jobs. The data includes any job changes that occurred during Obama’s presidency, as well as moves from Obama’s campaign to Google in 2008.

A link given in the above article leads to something to indicate that Google has been proven to abuse its market power, in countries where this is not tolerated:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/20/technology/google-android-lawsuit-europe/

Google charged by EU in Android monopoly lawsuit
by David Goldman @DavidGoldmanCNN April 20, 2016:

Google is facing a huge fine and major disruption to the way it does business after European officials filed new antitrust charges against the company.

The European Commission said Google was abusing its market position by imposing restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators.

Google's (GOOGL, Tech30) Android is the world's dominant mobile operating system. When licensing Android, Google requires smartphone makers to load 11 core Google apps onto the phone before a customer buys it. The apps need to be at least one swipe away from the home screen, and customers cannot delete those apps. ...

..."Based on our investigation thus far, we believe that Google's behavior denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation by other players, in breach of EU antitrust rules," said Margrethe Vestager, the head of competition policy at the European Commission.

The Commission said it believed Google had broken the law by:

1. Requiring manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google's Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as the default search service.

2. Preventing manufacturers from selling smartphones running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code.

3. Giving financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices. ...

...But this isn't the only antitrust case Google is facing in Europe. It is also fighting the European Commission on separate charges that it promotes its own results over rivals' blue links in search results. If Google loses that battle, it faces an additional $7 billion fine. ...

... The European Union's case against Google is similar to its landmark antitrust case brought against Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) a decade ago. In that case, Microsoft was found to have abused its dominant position in the desktop operating system market by forcing Windows PC makers to preload Internet Explorer onto their computers.

As a result of the lawsuit, Microsoft had to present European customers with a selection of competitors' Internet browsers to choose from. ...

And, even more pertinently:

https://thegoldwater.com/news/3347-Google-Charged-with-9-Billion-EU-Fine...

By Savannah Smith | 06-03-2017 News
Photo credit: Daniel Draghici | Dreamstime.com
Google Charged with $9 Billion EU Fine for Unfairly Rigging Search Results in its Favor

After concluding a seven-year investigation into Google triggered by massive complaints from both its U.S. and European rivals, the EU antitrust regulators intend to slap a hefty fine on Alphabet unit Google over its shopping service before the summer break takes place in August. The sanction will also pave the way for two other cases involving the world’s most popular internet search engine.

The EU competition authority alleged in April 2015 that Google was distorting internet search results to favor its shopping service causing harm to both its rivals and its consumers. ...

...Other than the fine, the EU Commission will also ask Google to stop its alleged anti-competitive practices. It is not yet clear, though, what measures it will order Google to adopt to ensure that rivals get equal treatment in internet shopping results. The regulator can opt to set out general principles or specific instructions for Google to follow.

The EU Commission's tough stance is in sharp contrast with the US Federal Trade Commission which settled its own web search case with Google in 2013 by requiring it to merely stop “scraping” reviews and other data from rival websites for its own products.

Google previously made three attempts to settle the case with the previous European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia in the hopes of blocking fine and being faulted for a wrongdoing, but was unsuccessful in all its tries. Almunia's successor Margrethe Vestager has also shown no willingness to settle with Google.

Google has also been charged with using its Android mobile operating system to disadvantage its rivals and with blocking competitors in online search advertising related to its “AdSense for Search” platform. The platform permits Google to serve as an intermediary for websites such as online retailers, telecoms operators or newspapers. The EU Commission has also sternly warned of massive fines in both cases.

So, how can Google have said 'Don't be evil' with a straight face? By redefining evil and projecting it onto the guys trying to stop the evil, the corporate PR tactics so commonly identified in corporate politicians and their proprganda. Same old, same old.

There's more related stuff I probably should put in but this is getting huge. I can't think what to cut, though, without missing/reinforcing important points.

Assuming anyone actually sees/reads this, lol. After all this time, the thread's probably buried.

But I'll anyway add that we must remember that countries and their governments belong to the people who inhabit them - not to whoever may happen to transiently hold any public office at any given time, not to a few of the wealthiest and most powerful, not to any corporations.

Any claim otherwise is insanely ridiculous, particularly since that's also a claim to essentially own us.

#4.2 But none of them provide any evidence, just assertions.

The timing on the algorithm change (april - june) sort of coincides with the drop in consortiumnews traffic... sort of. That happened July 18th or so.

I don't trust allegedly left statements any more than I trust anyone else's so I was hoping to see something I could verify.