Google works closely with the White House

Google’s unprecedented activity in communicating with government officials allowed him to avoid an antitrust investigation in 2012. This was reported by The Wall Street Journal. Top managers communicate with US government officials much more often than their competitors, and the company itself spends on lobbyists more than other large companies.

After Barack Obama’s re-election as US president in 2012, Google’s top managers came to the White House about 230 once - on average once a week, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, citing the official journal of visits. According to the Center for Responsible Policy, for 2014, Google was the second company in the United States in terms of spending on lobbyists. The search engine spent a million dollars on 16,8 lobbyists - a total of 500 thousand dollars less than the record holder Comcast, twice as much as Microsoft and four times more than Apple.

One of Google’s major lobbyists, Johanna Shelton, visited the White House more than 60 times during the second Obama administration, according to the WSJ. For comparison: for the same time, Comcast lobbyists went to the White House just 20 times.

The close work and active correspondence with US government officials allowed Google to avoid an antitrust investigation in 2012, despite the findings of the FTC report. Its authors concluded that Google manipulates search results in favor of its own projects and damages users and competitors. This report from 2012, accidentally fell into the hands of journalists The Wall Street Journal, and yesterday the newspaper published it. In the end, the FTC decided to stop the investigation against Google at the end of 2012 of the year.

The FTC members decided not to take any action against Google after a review of the case, which lasted for 19 months, the 9 study of millions of pages and many hours of testimony, said Google General Counsel Kent Walker. “The investigation was completed two years ago, and since then the number of ways of obtaining information on the Internet has grown significantly - users have many more options than ever before,” Volker believes. According to him, Google’s competitors, who complained about the discrimination of their sites in the search results, are also working successfully: Yelp increased revenues by more than 4 percent over 350, TripAdvisor doubled its revenues in the same time.