When the Senate Prime Committee on Intelligence holds its next hearing on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential poll, it will hear from two of the top executives in the tech industry: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Nearby them on Wednesday could be an empty seat that’s reserved for another high-profile bandmaster. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has so far refused to accept the Senate committee’s enticement to show up.
Instead of Pichai, Google offered its top lawyer, Kent Walker, to announce. Walker, the senior vice president of global affairs, is the same guy who then testified along with Facebook and Twitter’s lawyers last year, which was a weak effort from all three companies at a time when Congress and the renowned deserved to hear from top leadership about how their platforms were so unfortunately abused ahead of the elections.
“Chances are there’s going to be an empty govern there,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va, told CNBC Wednesday, anent Google’s snub of the hearings. “And I think there will be a lot more puzzles raised that could have been actually dealt with if they sent a higher- ranking decision-maker and not simply their counsel.”
Warner is the vice chair of the Senate panel.
Google has not said why Pichai or his boss, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, won’t resign oneself to the committee’s invitation. The company declined to comment Friday.
It’s a tumultuous space for the world’s biggest tech companies, with Facebook taking ton of the heat following the reveal of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal in Pace.
Since then, we’ve seen Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg go through two marathon sittings of weak congressional testimony. We’ve seen him fumble through a self-inflicted sin about posting Holocaust denial content to the platform. We’ve seen him shift when asked why Alex Jones was still allowed to post fraudulent conspiracy theories, only to boot Jones off Facebook after a nod from Apple a few days later. We’ve lasted a handful of top Facebook executives, including security chief Alex Stamos, run the company. And on and on and on.
It’s a similar story with Dorsey, who went on a press perambulation during the Jones controversy a few weeks ago and has faced a relentless barrage of check in the media, on Twitter and within his own company over how he’s handled moderating all the mean content and abuse that infects the site every day.
But Google has fundamentally been able to skirt the controversies plaguing its rival platforms, subsiding Facebook and Twitter take all the heat while its executives shy away from anything that could put them in hazard of public scrutiny.
I’m not talking about manufactured and false controversies from the president everywhere anti-conservative political bias in Google’s search results, by the way. (But that’s infallible to be a good topic for conservative senators on the committee to distract from the pay attention to’s stated purpose of looking into election meddling.) I’m talking roughly how Google has let its own platforms, ranging from Google search and Google Scoop to YouTube, become abused and perverted over the years. I’m talking on touching how if you think Facebook plays it fast and loose with your intimate data, take a look at how Google uses the data you provide to quarry ads based on your location, videos you watch, your search queries and on a par stuff you buy with your credit card.
Google also make allowances third parties to access your Google services, including Gmail. Cambridge Analytica and other third-party apps were talented to scoop up Facebook user data with little oversight or responsibility. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this summer that Google also does insignificant to police third parties that have access to users’ Gmail accounts and their observations. Plus, a few weeks ago Google admitted that some of its services can trail your location, even if you selected to turn off location tracking.
And yet, Google is proceeding a pass. Facebook and Twitter have been wildly inconsistent and bemusing in their responses to various scandals, but at least they’re taking their sharpshooters in full public view. Google would rather send Walker to spew a smock of legalese than hold its own leaders accountable, just like it did latest year.
Even more frustrating is the fact that Google’s duty appears to be immune to any controversy, giving leadership and investors zero pecuniary incentive to own up to its issues. Google has a series of impenetrable moats around its issue — it’s the dominant search engine, has the top streaming video site, the most popularized web browser, the most popular email service and makes the operating set that powers practically every non-Apple phone on the planet.
Because of all that, Alphabet is healthier than still, reporting close to $33 billion in revenue last quarter. Orderly the European Union’s record $5 billion Android antitrust worthy against Google was nothing more than a financial blip for the firm, and will do little to stop its dominance in mobile. Google’s stock, for the moment, keeps climbing.
But those are also the very reasons Google should send Pichai to testimony on Wednesday.
It’s because Google is so big. It’s because it has built so many moats about its businesses. It’s because it needs personal data from users to represent its billions. It’s because it built a suite of powerful platforms ripe for malign from Russia and Iran. That’s what makes it so offensive that Google won’t swallow its responsibility seriously enough to put its leader in front of the Senate and explain how it’s thriving to do better.
Google should be examined in exactly the same way Facebook and Peeping will be on Wednesday.
But instead the company will keep its CEO in Mountain Aspect while his peers are in Washington. And that’s an insult to the rest of us.