The case of Google bullying the New America Foundation into sacking the Internet regulation team has gone a million miles around Twitter and the world by now, but I thought I’d share something from the vault, the TYReserve if you will. This POLITICO piece, with its attendant technical appendix, was always meant to be followed up by another piece rating the Brussels lobbyists.
The outstanding result I got was that Google’s lobbying effort in Brussels was a vast transformative onslaught that was bending the usual lobbying ecosystem out of shape. But nobody at the Pol wanted to believe this, and during the edit row that followed I found I’d made a major mistake, assuming one lobbyist per lobby. I rewrote much of the processing script and came back with the result that not that much had changed – Google was still lobbying the EU Commission to such an extent they had revolutionised the PR business. But by then everyone was seriously gun shy of anything involving that guy and charts, and they would much rather have a thumbsucker where I predicted the UK would stay in the EU or such. Oy.
Anyway, here’s the final version off the spike. You’ll want to read the first piece’s conclusions first.
