Google spends millions on academic research to influence opinion, says watchdog

Campaign for Accountability said it identified 329 research papers published between 2005 and 2017 on public policy matters of interest to Google that were in some way funded by the company. Google lobbyists and lawyers pushed Google-funded research to journalists, the White House, Congress, and agency regulators investigating its conduct, such as the Federal Trade Commission, often without disclosing that the funding.

Scholars and academics were handed sponsorship cash to produce papers that supported Google's business and its policy goals in an attempt to curry favour with and influence the public, the research by the US-based Campaign for Accountability (CfA) said.

Explore the full database of papers by Google-funded academics. Paul Heald, a professor of law at the University of IL at Urbana-Champaign, for example, reportedly pitched a paper idea on copyrights to Google and received $18,830 to fund it, yet the 2012 publication made no mention of the relationship.

Google also pitched academic papers with working titles and abstracts to willing academic authors, a former employee for the company told the newspaper. "You can easily find similar activity by companies and organizations funded by our competitors, like AT&T, the MPAA, ICOMP, FairSearch and dozens more, including hundreds of pieces directly targeting Google".

Miller said the company expected academics to disclose its funding and maintain their independence.

A paper he published past year suggested volunteers could help gain copyright approval for books to be digitised and put online - a move that could benefit Google Books.

Google said the Campaign for Accountability's report was "misleading".

"Our support for the principles underlying an open internet is shared by many academics and institutions who have a long history of undertaking research on these topics - across important areas like copyright, patents, and free expression", said director of public policy Leslie Miller in a blog post. "And those backers won't 'fess up either", wrote Miller.

"Whenever Google's bad behavior is exposed, it invariably points the finger at someone else".

Google hit back saying the group refused to name its own corporate funders.

"The one funder the world does know about is Oracle, which is running a well-documented lobbying campaign against us", it wrote.

The report added: "The 329 Google-funded articles that we identified were cited almost 6,000 times in more than 4,700 unique articles".

"Oracle is not alone".