In 1911, U.S. Supreme Court ordered John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil to be broken up when the government won its antitrust suit against the oil giant. In 1998 it happened again, but while Bill Gates was fighting the Clinton administration's antitrust suit against Microsoft, in another part of the tech world, Sergey Brin and Larry Page raised $1 million to launch the next giant tech Google.
Google became publicly traded in 2004 hiring Eric Schmidt as its CEO. It reported a 2012 annual revenue of $50 billion, an increase from its 2011 $38 billion revenue. Google was criticized last year for avoiding paying billions of taxes here in US by shifting profit into offshore subsidiaries in Ireland and Bermuda, a "capitalist" act considered by its CEO. The company's slogan "Don't be evil" has put paying taxes in America as part of its evil list and avoiding it as part of smart capitalism according to its CEO. Google may be a tech giant but out of the five, it pays the lowest taxes in revenue.
On K Street of Washington D.C., however, Google has been busy increasing its lobbying effort since 2003.
A Wall Street Journal article by L. Gordon Crovitz titled "Silicon Valley's Suicide Impulse" reported that Google spent $25 million to stop an antitrust suit against it and hired fifteen lobby firms to combat the suit. Although Google's CEO Eric Schmidt is very close with Obama and it has former Congresswoman Susan Molinari, a Democrat, running its Washington lobby office, and Google employees gave Obama $1.6 million in 2008, making them no. 2 in political contributions, it didn't stop Obama's administration from going after them last year. It was a way of showing Google that Washington D.C. is still the boss, the untouchable giant both in politics and in business.
Last September, Obama's Federal Trade Commission chairman Democrat Jon Leibowitz announced a "formal investigation on google's search and search advertising". Obama in 2008 accused Bush of "having the weakest record of antitrust enforcement in the last half century". But government threat from Obama is not going to stop Silicon Valley from supporting the Democrat party. The tech companies will always support the Democrat party who may be a threat to them financially but they know will always support their "sophisticated" progressive liberal "social values", the only thing that matters in the end.
Copyright 2013 Ketchie V. Schauf
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