Thank you for inviting me to testify.
My name is Courtney Radsch, and I'm the director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute, and a researcher and affiliated fellow at several institutions including UCLA and the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).
I’ve spent the past 20 years of my career as a journalist and researcher, and I have never received funding from a tech giant for my research. The Open Markets Institute does not accept any funding from tech giants, making us a rare independent voice on technology policy and journalism.
In fact, what happened to Open Markets is emblematic of the way tech giants wield their money and power to intimidate and to bully. The Google-funded think tank New America Foundation fired Barry Lynn, our executive director, and exiled staff in 2017 after OMI issued a statement praising one of the first penalties that the European Commission imposed on Google for anti-competitive conduct. This is not a unique example of how big tech manipulates institutions to dissuade critical research while it also funds them to produce “research” that supports its positions and advocates for positions to further big tech interests.
Just yesterday, renowned disinformation scholar Dr. Joan Donovan filed a whistle-blower complaint against Harvard for retaliating against her after the university received a record half billion dollars from The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. As the complaint notes, Dr. Donovan’s work was “particularly timely as it is used to inform policymakers as they legislate”.
Indeed, much of what we know about how these opaque oligopolies operate is because journalists and researchers have ferreted it out or a whistle-blower leaked it.
I will cover just five ways, briefly, that big tech deployed its vast resources and charitable arms to evade regulation, to influence research and journalistic coverage, and to intimidate critics and undermine legal regulatory oversight. While the playbook borrows from big tobacco, big oil and big pharma, the manipulation is intensified through the use of their own platforms to manipulate public opinion and to censor their critics.