Daily Debrief: Corn farmers vs. Google Video
Daily Debrief: Corn farmers vs. Google Video Transcript
[ music ] ^M00:00:04
>> This is the cnetnews.com Daily Debrief, I'm Charlie Cooper. No surprise any more to say that Washington has become a political battle ground for technology companies. But today we've got a doozy of a story, thanks to Decklin McCulloh [assumed spelling], who is here with us. Decklin, so this revolves around a letter sent by the American Corn Growers Association to Congress, registering their opposition to a proposed Yahoo Google advertising deal. Now I know that corn growers do a lot of different things, but why in the world would a farm lobbying group get exercised about this?
>> I asked them that on Monday, I spoke to their lobbyist on the phone. And he said first that if you type in corn growers, or the acronym to their website, sometimes it doesn't, links that they don't want appear on a Google search. The second -
>> Now that's the official story.
>> Yeah, the second explanation is that maybe more concentration, market power is bad. That's the official story.
>> But as you found out, there was more to it than that.
>> There was more to it than that. There's, the document they sent out to reporters, a pdf, and it had, if you look at the meta data of the pdf it included the name of a staffer for a group called the Law Media Group. It's in Washington, DC. It does government affairs, most people would call that lobbying, it does public relations, it does issue campaigns and organizing campaigns. And it happens to have AT and T as a former client, and the cable providers as a current client.
>> And AT and T, the cable providers are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the question of net neutrality, vis a vis Google.
>> They pretty much are exactly logger heads with Google on that point.
>> And net neutrality is the proposition that there should be, the provider should not pick favorites, and that technologies, applications, etcetera should be charged the same -
>> And if there should be federal laws to that point and so on, yes.
>> What really do we know about the Law Media Group? Do they, on the record do they say that they are connected with this effort in some way, shape, or form?
>> They said on the record, I just talked to them a few minutes ago, and they said that we did, we were in fact involved with the corn growers letter, but they would not say, and in fact denied that any of the cable providers had anything to do with the letter.
>> Do we have enough evidence to suggest that the corn growers are acting as it were, as a front group for the net neutrality folks opposing Google.
>> Check back with me tomorrow on that point, I'm working on a follow-up story. [ background music ]
>> Okay, that's something we'll do. On behalf of Decklin McCulloh, I'm Charlie Cooper. ^M00:02:51 [ music ]
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