Reporter recounts being pressured by Google and her bosses to take down a Forbes piece in 2011 criticizing Google's monopolistic practices with Plus and search
The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid …
Context & Ripple Effects
This first-person account lands days after the New York Times reported that the New America Foundation parted ways with an open-internet critic after Google became a major funder — the reporter here says she faced the same dynamic firsthand at Forbes in 2011, with both Google and her own bosses pushing to unpublish her piece on Plus and search. Google's stated defense is that the information was under NDA.
The companion coverage makes the mechanism explicit: as Talking Points Memo argues, publishers' extreme dependence on Google services gives the company effective monopoly power over them, so criticism carries a real business cost.
First-order effects
- Forbes takes an immediate credibility hit: the account shows an editor siding with a source's commercial interest over a writer's published work, and Google's NDA framing puts its press-relations and legal playbook under fresh scrutiny.
Second-order effects
- Outlets whose traffic and reach run through Google face a structural disincentive to publish similar criticism — the TPM reporting frames this as monopoly power exercised through dependency rather than through any formal contract.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, scrutiny shifts from Google's market conduct to its information control: the same thread resurfaces in 2020 reporting that Google, under antitrust pressure, limited discussion of antitrust issues among employees and recruits, giving regulators and plaintiffs a documented record of suppression alongside the market-power claims.
The trend: Google's control of distribution is doubling as control of discourse about itself — from think-tank funding to newsroom pressure — feeding directly into the antitrust reckoning around the company.