This is what technocracy looks like:
When President Obama announced his support last week for a Federal Communications Commission plan to open the market for cable set-top boxes — a big win for consumers, but also for Google — the cable and telecommunications giants who used to have a near-stranglehold on tech policy were furious. AT&T chief lobbyist Jim Cicconi lashed out at what he called White House intervention on behalf of “the Google proposal.”
He’s hardly the first to suggest that the Obama administration has become too close to the Silicon Valley juggernaut. […]
Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.
No other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government.
Most people probably think this is at least better than the cozy relationship the Bush administration had with oil companies. Think that through.
The most powerful technology company in the world, a company that has spent literally billions of dollars over the last three years acquiring companies that were developing artificial intelligence, neural networks, natural language processing, robotics, home automation systems, high-altitude drones, and driverless cars — in other words, a company that has, or is close to having, the power to keep you under constant, 24-hour-a-day surveillance, store the data you generate (even when you’re offline), and share that data with the government — has become a de facto extension of the United States government.