In a headline in the Wall Street Journal this Tuesday (1st), Google ended the successful “blockbuster” year, with revenue of US$ 75 billion in the fourth quarter, a jump of 32%.
And the threat of “drastic regulation” of American Big Techs had vanished, according to the same WSJ, weeks earlier. But investment banks like Morgan Stanley warned that there would be a congressional regulatory effort ahead of the US elections.
Continuing act, at the top of the Financial Times, “Big Techs Increase Funding for US Foreign Policy Think Tanks.” They are the “study centers” that are confused with lobbying organizations in Washington.
“Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are behind the growth in funds at four of the most prestigious: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Center for a New American Security, Brookings Institution and Hudson Institute.”
The objective, the newspaper said in a statement, is “to fight stricter regulation using anti-China lobby”.
A first result was the “voicering” letter to Congress signed by Leon Panetta, former Clinton and Obama administrations, Democrats, and Dan Coats, former Trump administration, Republican. The antitrust measures under discussion, they and other signatories say, would leave Chinese companies like Huawei and Tencent “in a better position to assume global prominence.”
Think tanks themselves admit, as in the case of Hudson, that: “Facebook has supported our work in analyzing threats to American competitiveness from a rising China.”
IN EUROPE ALSO
The FT reported days before that Big Tech spending on lobbying also skyrocketed in the European Union, with the same end, but other arguments.
ELECTORAL ALERT
In an article in the New York Times, the former executive who led Facebook’s work in elections around the world, including the Brazilian elections in 2014 (Dilma Rousseff) and 2018 (Jair Bolsonaro), warned that the platform “is not prepared for the approaching electoral tsunami”. Lists Brazil and also France, Kenya, Australia, Philippines and USA.
It says it lacks even “people with knowledge of a country-specific language and culture to make difficult decisions about expression”—in part because the majority of investment to do so “is focused on the US, although users in other countries are the vast majority.”
Source: Folha
