Google, Microsoft to team up on privacy push launching tomorrow
The world's biggest tech heavyweights are set to team up with each other to influence the future of Internet privacy law. Google, Microsoft and a number of other civil liberties groups, think tanks and tech companies …
Context & Ripple Effects
Eight months ago, the story was a broad bloc of tech companies lining up against Google, as captured in the August 2009 coalition of tech giants uniting against it. Tomorrow's launch flips the frame: Google and Microsoft, fierce competitors in search and advertising, are jointly joining civil liberties groups, think tanks and other tech companies to influence the shape of upcoming Internet privacy legislation.
That both companies confirmed their participation matters because privacy is one of the few policy arenas where their interests converge — each holds vast user-data troves that pending legislation could constrain, so co-writing the terms beats lobbying alone.
First-order effects
- Google and Microsoft gain a single coordinated voice in the privacy debate, entering the legislative process as drafters of framing rather than late-stage objectors.
- Civil liberties groups and think tanks in the coalition acquire two of the industry's biggest data holders as allies, shifting the perceived balance of the privacy debate away from pure consumer-vs-industry framing.
Second-order effects
- Smaller ad networks and web companies outside the coalition face a standards conversation being set by its largest participants, forcing them either to join successor efforts or absorb rules they did not shape.
- Lawmakers drafting privacy bills now have a ready-made industry-civil-liberties consensus position to engage with, which can crowd out more restrictive proposals from regulators acting unilaterally.
Third-order effects
- If rival data businesses keep concluding that shared regulatory exposure outweighs product competition, coalition-based policy shaping becomes a standing playbook for how the largest internet companies respond to legislative threats.
- Privacy rules negotiated with incumbent input tend to embed compliance costs that favor large operators, structurally advantaging the very companies at the table.
The trend: Internet giants are learning that when regulation threatens everyone's data business, even direct rivals coordinate to shape the rules before they are written.