Don't be evil was, of course, Google's motto. The New York Times had a piece recently on the firing of Barry Lynn from the New America Foundation, a Democratic think tank that, if memory doesn't fail me, was at least initially connected to the Clintons. The whole thing resulted from the fact that Lynn was favorable to the European Union regulation of Google, a major donor to the think tank.
Given that I've been writing about the influence of corporate money in academia, I thought it was a good idea to link to this other story about Google's perverse influence in the public debate. In my view, Google is not on the cancer-denying or climate-change-denying business simply as a result of a market structure phenomena. And in many ways Google and Facebook (don't get me wrong Amazon is also dangerous, but in a different way, they still sell stuff, whereas the other two sell your information), or Big Internet, are more dangerous than Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
