Google Sought To Hide Political Dealmaking

A blog entry by Michael Kanellos at ZDNet links to and expands upon an article in the Charlotte Observer. Last year Google was apparently throwing its weight around in North Carolina, seeking tax breaks from state and local legislators. When the company didn't get what it wanted pressure was brought to bear on legislative aides, journalists, and politicians. The search giant was especially touchy about keeping the negotiations secret: "Executives didn't want anybody even to mention the company's name for fear that competitors could learn of its plans. Most involved with the negotiations were required to sign nondisclosure agreements ... That posed challenges for elected officials, charged with conducting the public's business in the open. As the tax measure wended its way through the legislature, some lawmakers began linking it to Google." The results of this deal are extremely lucrative for both sides. Google brought some $600 million in investment and as many as 200 jobs to the state, and legislation enacted with Google's help is projected to save the company some $89 million in taxes over 30 years.

Comments

Re:Um

[GrumpySimon]

Yeah, the shine's definitely gone off Google, eh? at the rate google (and yahoo) are swallowing up other sites there's going to be some major monopolising going on.

I think searching the web is one of the few bastions where closed source still rules, and it surprises me that no-one's really made an open source search engine. I'm aware that there are things like Nutch and ht:dig out there but their scope is completely different (site-wide searching primarily).

So - why don't we have an open source search engine? Pagerank is fairly easy to implement, and would serve as a good starting point for improvement. Writing apps to rank and sort web pages strikes me as the type of problem that a lot of smart people would find a lot of fun.

I know that it requires a crap load of infrastructure, but if Wikipedia can handle it. Besides, you can index one hell of a lot of pages with the standard few GB of bandwidth a month on cheap-ish hosting plans.

So - why not?

Re:Just be a little evil

[fatphil]

I'm on a .fi network

              hl=en hl=fi hl=no .com 6.17 6.21 6.21 .co.uk 6.28 6.21 6.21 .fi 6.28 6.21 6.21 .no 6.19 6.21 6.29

So it looks like it doesn't depend only on the TLD you use, but also the hl parameter.
But not in a particularly logical manner.

Slashcode's broken my Plain Old Text table, that's 3 columns for the three languages 4 rows for the 4 TLDs

Re:The simple answer: IPO

[ringo74]

When you make any sort of investment, like buying insurance or a retirement plan, you don't ask how evil the corporations are. All you want is the biggest return for the lowest price, which means the portfolios that will make your investment will be composed of stock from the companies with biggest profit.

With all due respect, sir, you speak for yourself. I *do* check the behaviour and ethical standards of the companies I purchase from or invest in. Yes, sometimes this means lesser profit. So what?

You call this capitalism?

[bhmit1]

Sadly, this is pretty normal these days, and I don't blame Google for doing it. They have to look out for their share holders, and that involves saving money when reasonable. I only partially blame the state, since if NC didn't do this, another state would and the jobs would go that way too, making NC a worse place for their residents. But the sad thing is that small businesses are just now getting their tax bills for the year from their counties (yes, for the privilege of having a file cabinet in my office, I owe the county more money). And the tax breaks that the big businesses get are basically discrimination against smaller businesses and anti-competitive.

We are raising barriers of entry into every large industry we create. I don't think that it's up to the states to fix this, but the federal level should pass a law banning these anti-competitive practices. No city, county, or state should have the right to change taxes on one group in such a way that it discourages competition. We should implement this similar to anti-discrimination laws that we already have to minimize the impact on the local governments right to raise money.

Re:Um

[sphealey]

> I'm sure Bill Gates was young, hungry,
> honest, and loved at one point,

In fact, for many years Microsoft was seen in the same light as Google is today: as a savior from the iron-fisted "data processing overlords". It wasn't until the 1992-1994 timeframe that information professionals started thinking that Microsoft might have other designs. Now Microsoft is viewed as the iron-fisted overlord, and Google the savior...

I think The Who have a song about this.

sPh

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

The rationale behind that one is kind of interesting - it runs something like this.

1. Domain squatting will exist no matter what we do
2. Right now parked domains are worthless piles of annoying punch-the-monkey ads, spyware infections etc. People who land on them by accident at best have their time wasted, at worst are actually at risk of infection.
3. By creating AdSense For Domains, we provide a way to "monetize" parked domains in a useful and somewhat profitable way by showing ads related to the domain name itself and/or keywords provided by the parker. The user wins, because typo domains become marginally less crap. The domain parker wins because they have a legit/non-annoying way to pay for the domains. And Google wins because it makes a small but non-zero amount of cash.

Re:Um

[sumdumass]

It's not evil. I doubt the numbers even make it apear that way. If anything it is a net loss for google until it developes products in that facility or puts it to use. And there is no guarentee that a use will make money.

The reasons for secrecy is that they are probably planning on using it for something other then the Data center of the traditional sence and they didn't want competitors knowing about the shift. It is probable something obvious to those in the industry if they looked hard enough. Besides, the tax revenue from related activities itself is likley to recoup and percieved tax loss by the tax break. New houses will be built closer to the facility, paper,office supplies and bathroom supplies will likley be purchased there. People who now don't contribute to the tax pool will have jobs makeing them a contributor, and probably increased power requirments will cause the exapnsion of some generating facility in the area increasing employment and taxes from there.

I find it funny thta a company is suppoedly evil if they don't wantto work within the current system. I mean, if the taxes were low enough already would google have been asking for a tax deal? yet we attempt to charge the hel out of the companies who can pay and for some reason that doesn't make us evil.

Re:Open Source Search

[eh2o]

Can we run a search engine backend over P2P/bittorrent? There is no shortage of hardware if its distributed. At least, the SPAM-bot networks don't seem to have a problem getting enough bandwidth. :)