Former senior fellow at New American Foundation Barry Lynn says he and his team members lost their jobs at the think tank after Lynn publicly criticized Google, according to the New York Times. The organization, which is based in Washington, D.C., has received over $21 million in funding from the tech giant.
The trouble started when Lynn, who served as the director of the Open Markets Program, posted a statement praising the European Union’s decision to fine Google $2.7 billion for violating antitrust rules. He also encouraged American regulators to follow suit. It read, in part:
Google's market power is one of the most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today. By requiring that Google give equal treatment to rival services instead of privileging its own, Vestager is protecting the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend. We call upon U.S. enforcers, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and states attorneys general, to build upon this important precedent, both in respect to Google and to other dominant platform monopolists including Amazon.
Executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet Eric Schmidt was not too pleased with Lynn’s remarks—he directly contacted New America’s president Anne-Marie Slaughter. The link was mysteriously removed from the site for a few hours; the statement remains but it seems that the damage was done. A few days later, Slaughter fired the entire Open Markets Program team. The New York Times got a copy of the email.
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.
While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”
Mr. Lynn, in an interview, charged that Ms. Slaughter caved to pressure from Mr. Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.
Unsurprisingly, Google’s people say that the company has no role in the think tank’s research or the decision to fire Lynn. Slaughter took to Twitter to say the reports are false.
Now Lynn is working on making Open Markets into an independent nonprofit organization with the same team members he had at New American. They’ve launched a digital campaign called Citizens Against Monopoly, which accuses Google of censorship and promises “We are going to make sure Google doesn’t get away with this.”