Mr. Google Goes To Washington
As reported in today’s Washington Post, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, flew out to D.C. to try and make nice with the ‘inside the beltway’ crowd. It seems that things did not go as well as expected in that Mr. Schmidt had to answer a question on email tech support and “by the time the clock ran out on Schmidt’s 25-minute speech, more than a third of the audience was gone.”
Still this has to be seen as a much better showing than Google’s last visit to D.C. where one of the intrepid founders, Sergey Brin, brought his silicon valley swagger and, according to Frank Barnako, was ignored last year.
To its credit, Google is tackling issues many online advertisers and publishers will find important including net neutrality and taxation on internet transactions. Still, it seems that Google can’t get out of its way when it stumbles into areas with which they lack familiarity or sensitivity necessary to understand what their partner (Congress) needs from them. Google would do well to learn from Hollywood as chronicled by IP Democracy.
-- John Ebbert
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