[Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[James Alexander]

Google (and facebook and twitter etc) are large corporate organizations
with profits heavily on their mind (by law, they are responsible to their
shareholders). While they clearly have good reasons to be opposed to SOPA
and PIPA there reasons are not exactly the same as ours and in my opinion
we would be hurting ourselves to rely solely on them for any kind of
advocacy work we do ( work that is clearly spelled out in the strategy
guide as important for issues like SOPA). A corporate group is going to try
and get the best outcome for their shareholders and their company and that
outcome is NOT necessarily the best outcome for us (for example exemptions
for themselves but not websites like Wikipedia).

An example is actually mentioned in the article (The OPEN act). The OPEN
act is highly divisive, we don't know if we'll support it or not yet (or
just 'not oppose' it) and we can't rely on google and others to align with
what we we're thinking.

James


On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Philippe Beaudette
> <philippe at wikimedia.org>wrote:
>
> > You trust GOOGLE's interests to align sufficiently with ours, to the
> > extent that you're willing to cede government affairs to them?
>
>
> Yes.
>
> Why won't their interest align on the same side as everyone else ? The
> issue is just SOPA and PIPA, and there are two sides. Google has taken its
> stand publicly along with WMF and everyone else. What other interests can
> they have?
>
> Regards
> Theo
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