The 463: Inside Tech : Google & Yahoo! Expand Policy Teams

It's evident that public policies impacting Internet companies are growing exponentially in scale and impact every year. How are two Internet leaders responding? A look at Google and Yahoo!....

Last year, around the time of the Gmail privacy imbroglio, Google made its first full-time government affairs hire by naming Andrew McLaughlin its Senior Policy Counsel. Andrew is an Internet Policy deep thinker who played a key role in getting ICANN off the ground and through its critical formative first few years. That job and his role as a senior fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society translate into a lot of good contacts in the (often self-proclaimed, but nevertheless important) "Internet Community". Andrew's Harvard J.D. and Yale B.A. also nicely fit the Google hiring profile. Andrew is based in NYC, but travels fairly extensively.

Around the beginning of the new year, Google grabbed...

... Michael Yang from the California Senate Judiciary Committee to serve as a Policy Counsel. Probably not so coincidently, this is the same committee where the innovation-quashing Gmail/email scanning bill was debated last year. Committee member Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont) introduced the bill. (long story short: the bill was wisely modified to provide exceptions to what Gmail does, anti-spam efforts and anti-virus technology and then shelved until a reintroduction this year as SB 7. Groups like TechNet remain opposed SB 7 for multiple valid technological and precedent-setting reasons.) Beyond email privacy, the Judiciary Committee also houses much of the major Internet policy debates in the legislature like cyber crime and digital copyright. Indeed, one of its subcommittee's is dubbed "Technological Crime and Consumers."

Now, according to National Journal's Technology Daily, Google has hired former Center for Democracy & Technology associate director Alan Davidson to lobby on its behalf in Washington. Well-known Internet privacy advocate Ray Everett-Church noted the hire on his blog, saying:

(Davidson) is one of the smartest, kindest, and most thoughtful people you will ever run across — definitely a rare breed in Washington DC policy circles! His blend of high-tech knowledge, legal and policy acumen, and his innate nature as an all-around ‘nice guy’ is just exactly the kind of leadership that Google very much needs in Washington.

CDT is an impressive group and Davidson played a key role in making this so. One would guess that Davidson would play a lead role in working with the many of the key third-party groups, think tanks and House/Senate Democrats, while a soon to be hired Republican Google lobbyist will focus on dealing with the Congressional majority party and the Administration

For those keeping score at home on Google advanced degrees will be relieved to know that Davidson has a Yale J.D. and studied computer science at MIT. The mind reels when considering the education of whoever gets the Google policy job currently posted on Google's employment.

The gig in question is the Executive Director of the Google Foundation. Remember the famous letter (manifesto?) to potential shareholders prior to the Google IPO? One bit said:

We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place …
We intend to contribute significant resources to the Google Foundation, including employee time and approximately 1 percent of Google’s equity and profits in some form. We hope some day this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.
--From Letter from the Founders: An Owner’s Manual for Google Shareholders

The Foundation ED will:

...play the key role in working with our founders and senior executive team to define the mission of the Google Foundation and to build an organization capable of carrying out that mission through investing in socially progressive companies, making targeted philanthropic donations, influencing public policy, and managing teams working on significant Foundation-based projects.

Over at Yahoo!, they've had a small core group of policy folks for a good while and are now expanding. Yahoo!'s team is led ably by VP of Public Policy John Scheibel, who entered the tech policy world in its early days after spending nearly a decade as a staffer on Capitol Hill. Scheibel opened Yahoo!'s DC operation in January 1999. According to Yahoo!'s job site, the company plans to hire senior corporate counsel who will:

... advocate on a wide range of public policy issues in the US and in Asia. The issues include privacy, service provider liability, spam, intellectual property, and telecommunications. In the US, you will be advocating before those governmental entities that affect international policy including the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, the US Trade Representative and the Department of Treasury. You will spend about 2 weeks per month in Asia advocating before governmental agencies and working with like-minded interests in the private and non-profit sectors in several countries.

Additionally, Yahoo! is hiring a State Government Relations Director who will:

... be responsible for identifying public policy issues in the 50 states, developing a strategy to address those issues to protect Yahoo's interests, and then executing that strategy.

Yahoo! also recently signed up the connected, tech-savvy lobbying firm of Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti to help them manage the many issues on the company's plate in DC.

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