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Is Google Really Committed to ‘Universally Accessible’ Information?

Posted October 28th, 2008 at 11:36am in Energy and Environment, Enterprise and Free Markets 2 Print This Post Print This Post

As defenders of the free market, The Heritage Foundation fully supports Google’s private sector investments in clean energy technologies. However, there are some troubling nuggets of information buried in today’s New York Times article on Google’s energy interests. Miguel Helft reports:

Google has also increased its lobbying in Washington on energy issues. … Google has gone to great lengths to conceal how much electricity it uses in its data centers. For instance, Google agreed to build a $600 million data center in Oklahoma only after the State Legislature passed a law exempting public utilities from disclosing the energy use of their largest customers. Google has also vowed to be carbon neutral, but unlike its rival Yahoo, for instance, it has refused to reveal its overall carbon emissions.

Google’s mission statement reads: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

How does paying off the Oklahoma legislature to make information on public utilities less transparent comport with making information ‘universally accessible and useful’?

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2 Responses to “Is Google Really Committed to ‘Universally Accessible’ Information?”

  1. Thomas Gray on at said:

    When I came upon the heritage foundation web site I knew right away this is a site that at the least is searching for truth if not always showing their findings. [ google ] by my guess recieves a notable amount of mony from the green movement in ways I know nothing about so I understand why this happened,,, good work heritage.

    I see also that you people at the heritage are being picked on by the obama election people,, This is something I have seen before and happened to me also in the past. The truth means nothing to these people,, my advice is file it and forget it, there are to many more important topics to work on. The dirt that these people are about to sling on you is going to make it much harder to get support for much more important work.

    Tom.

  2. MusicVideosXL on at said:

    Dear Author blog.heritage.org !
    What words… super, a magnificent phrase

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