The White House and Google are quite chummy report says

With the FTC’s 2012 probe into Google‘s search practices all said and done, it became quite apparent that Mountain View has quite a bit of pull in the nation’s capital. A new report from The Wall Street Journal, high ranking Googler’s, including Mr. Eric Schmidt himself, met with White House officials to the tune of 230 different times across two terms.

If you’re doing the math, that’s about once a week for about four years. These meetings also happened around the time right before the commission and Google settled the antitrust lawsuit. While what exactly was discussed wasn’t shown in those meetings, the FTC insists that it maintains an independence as a regulatory agency. What the WSJ eludes to is that Google’s got some lobbying pull in Washington to defeat just such a major antitrust investigation.

The search giant has shown that it’s got influence and willing to spend money to do so. The company spent $16.8 million last year in lobbying efforts. In a related area, Megan Smith, Google’s former VP is now the US chief technology officer and a high tech adviser to the president.

As time progresses, these relationships and Google’s influence will be called into question and the report shows, that Google’s got the wallet to back it up.

Source: Wall Street Journal

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