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Campaign Against Project Nimbus Gathers Steam And Supporters

August 25, 2024 Omar Zahzah, The Electronic Intifada. , , , ,
Years of activism against Google’s complicity in Israel’s colonial violence against Palestinians have forced the multinational tech behemoth into a rigid moral impasse and exposed the hollowness of its brand. In April 2021, Google and Amazon were awarded a $1.2 billion contract with Israel for Project Nimbus, which aimed to streamline all of Israel’s government and military operations into one cloud service. Hundreds of Google and Amazon workers opposed the deal out of the conviction that such an undertaking would bolster “further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians” and “expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land,” as they wrote in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in 2021.

How US Big Tech Monopolies Colonized The World: Welcome To Neo-Feudalism

August 19, 2024 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
US Big Tech corporations have essentially colonized the world. In almost every country on Earth, the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy was built is owned and controlled by a small handful of monopolies, based largely in Silicon Valley. This system is looking more and more like neo-feudalism. Just as the feudal lords of medieval Europe owned all of the land and turned almost everyone else into serfs, who broke their backs producing food for their masters, the US Big Tech monopolies of the 21st century act as corporate feudal lords, controlling all of the digital land upon which the digital economy is based.

Google Profits Extraordinarily Off Of Not Having Competition

August 14, 2024 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. , , ,
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” So ruled district court Judge Amit Mehta in United States v. Google, being called a “landmark” antitrust case that will affect not just Google, but potentially all tech giants in the current landscape. The point was, Google pays billions every year to companies like Apple and Samsung that distribute search engines, to ensure that it’s the only search engine anyone would see, by making sure it’s the preset default on devices. If your supermarket only had one brand of milk on the shelf, even if it had some others in the back, you would recognize that as unfair. But for many of us, the internet is still a mystery miracle, and we’re not used to bringing the same sorts of questions to bear.

Google Fired Us For Protesting Its Complicity In The War On Gaza

April 30, 2024 Mohammad Khatami, Zelda Montes, and Kate Sim, Scheer Post. , , , , ,
Earlier this month, the three of us, along with dozens of our co-workers, took part in a coordinated set of civil resistance actions at Google offices around the United States. Some workers occupied Google’s New York offices. Others occupied the Sunnyvale, California, office of Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud. This protest was an escalation of the ongoing No Tech for Apartheid(NOTA) campaign, which has been demanding for years that Google and Amazon cancel Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal that Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services signed with the Israeli military and government in 2021.

Organizing Google’s Worldwide Worker Walkout

April 29, 2024 Dan Feidt, Unicorn Riot. , , ,
Cambridge, MA — At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on December 11, 2018 an open forum titled, “#MeToo and Workers’ Power: Building Solidarity at Google and Beyond,” covered the inner workings of the global Google walkout of 20,000 employees and contractors in 2018. Hosted by the Tech Workers Coalition and MIT’s Radius, the speakers and attendees examined the truth about how Google divides its labor force between contractors and workers. The year of 2018 saw unprecedented mobilizations against management at the biggest companies in the tech industry.

Google Employees Sit-In To Protest ‘Project Nimbus’ Contract With Israel

April 17, 2024 Akičita Šuŋka-Wakaŋ Ska, Unicorn Riot. , , , , , ,
Manhattan, NY — Google employees organized a sit-in at the tech company’s Chelsea office in New York City and occupied the office of Google Cloud’s CEO Thomas Kurian in California on April 16, 2024. The demonstration aimed to expose the internal unrest surrounding Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a cloud technology contract between the Israeli military, Google, and Amazon which has sparked allegations of complicity in human rights violations that surround Israel’s war on Gaza. After 10 hours of protest, Google ordered the police to arrest both groups of workers with a man stating the workers in NYC were placed on “administrative leave” before they were arrested.

Protesters Outside Google Call For Immediate End To ‘Project Nimbus’

December 15, 2023 Rachael Myrow, KQED. , , , , ,
Pro-Palestinian Google employees protested outside Google offices in San Francisco on Thursday to demand the tech giant cancel a $1.2 billion contract — called “Project Nimbus” — with the Israeli government and military. An estimated 500 protesters chanted “Google, Google you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” reflecting growing outrage over the contract during Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza. The Israeli Finance Ministry described the Project Nimbus contract as “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.”

Justice Department Says Google ‘Flexed Its Muscle’ As A Monopolist

September 14, 2023 Luke Goldstein, The American Prospect. , , ,
Washington, D.C. – On Tuesday, the government opened its first major monopolization case in decades at the D.C. District Court with opening statements from both the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the defendant, Google. Despite the stakes of the trial, the remainder of the legal proceeding will take place in a near-total blackout, since requests for public audio have been denied by Judge Amit Mehta and even in-person attendants are restricted from digital access inside the courtroom. For nearly two decades, Google has served as the “on-ramp” and gatekeeper of the digital world through its dominance of search engine functions, which is the target of this case.

The Google Employee Who Helped Edward Snowden In Hong Kong

June 18, 2023 Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian. , , , , ,
Early on the morning of 10 June 2013, Hong Kong time, the journalist Glenn Greenwald and film-maker Laura Poitras published on the Guardian site a video revealing the identity of the NSA whistleblower behind one of the most damning leaks in modern history. It began: “My name is Ed Snowden.” William Fitzgerald, then a 27-year-old policy employee at Google, knew he wanted to help. But he didn’t yet know how. Snowden was arguably the most wanted man in the world. The confidential documents he shared with Greenwald, Poitras and the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill detailed a sweeping US government surveillance program that was global in reach and involved some of the world’s best known tech companies.

Tech Layoffs Are About Punishing Workers And Driving Down Wages

February 16, 2023 Rose Lemlich, Left Voice , , , ,
In January, amid mass layoffs across the tech industry, Google laid off 6 percent of its workforce, or about 12,000 workers. In protest, dozens of tech workers crowded the sidewalk outside of Google’s Chelsea offices on February 2, sharing stories of laid-off coworkers and urging each other to join the union. The protest took place while executives at Alphabet (Google’s parent company) were on an earnings call with investors, announcing billions in profits. The workers highlighted the cruelty of how workers were told they’d lost their jobs. One anonymous worker shared that they were laid off via email while eating breakfast in the office.

Google’s Quest To Digitize Valuable Military Tissue Samples

January 2, 2023 James Bandler, Propublica. , , , ,
In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of surprising visitors: two artificial intelligence scientists from Google. In a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse at the Joint Pathology Center, they stood amid stacks holding the crown jewels of the center’s collection: tens of millions of pathology slides containing slivers of skin, tumor biopsies and slices of organs from armed service members and veterans. Standing with their Navy sponsor behind them, the Google scientists posed for a photograph, beaming. Mostly unknown to the public, the trove and the staff who study it have long been regarded in pathology circles as vital national resources: Scientists used a dead soldier’s specimen that was archived here to perform the first genetic sequencing of the 1918 Flu.

We Need A New Approach To Giant Tech Firms Like Google

December 1, 2022 Lynn Parramore, Institute For New Economic Thinking. , , ,
Since the 1970s, economists buying into the Chicago School of Antitrust have waved off the dangers of lax antitrust policies, professing that “the market” would sort out issues of competition and punish companies that abuse size and power. The Chicagoans’ narrow focus on direct consumer costs as the sole measure of harm didn’t consider the impact of consolidation on small businesses, start-ups, workers, or, for that matter, democratic norms. Nor did it raise red flags for tech platforms that were touted as “free” for users (while monetizing our attention and personal data). A growing number of critics argue that these basic assumptions are both wrong and outdated, as evidenced by the fact that in many industries, particularly technology, companies have been growing to gargantuan proportions and, as anybody who owns a smartphone is painfully aware, they seem free to gobble competitors, hinder innovation, and serve up crappy, overpriced products.

Lessons On Workplace Activism From Winning Campaigns At Google

November 10, 2022 Tom Hoy, Waging Nonviolence. , ,
On Sept. 14, 2020, Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted a blog outlining the company’s “Third Decade of Climate Action,” with its escalated commitments to addressing the crisis. Among them were an elimination of Google’s entire carbon legacy, a commitment to run all of its campuses and data centers on carbon free electricity, and promises to invest in tools to promote energy efficiency. The announcement came on the heels of an escalating pressure campaign from Google workers for the tech giant to do better on climate change. Like many campaign victories, it was an imperfect one. Many of the Google workers’ demands, like a commitment to cease funding for climate-denying think tanks, remained unaddressed.

Former Israeli Spies Work Top Jobs At Google, Facebook And Microsoft

November 1, 2022 Alan MacLeod, Mintpress News. , , , , , , ,
A MintPress study has found that hundreds of former agents of the notorious Israeli spying organization, Unit 8200, have attained positions of influence in many of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Unit 8200 is infamous for surveilling the indigenous Palestinian population, amassing kompromat on individuals for the purposes of blackmail and extortion. Spying on the world’s rich and famous, Unit 8200 hit the headlines last year, after the Pegasus scandal broke. Former Unit 8200 officers designed and implemented software that spied on tens of thousands of politicians and likely aided in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

No Tech For Apartheid Israel

September 17, 2022 Lowkey, Mintpress News. , , , ,
In this episode of The Watchdog, former Google employee Ariel Koren joins Lowkey and articulates her experience at the big tech giant, claiming it has gradually developed an institutionalised pro-Israeli bias. She also reveals ways in which employees attempting to hold the company accountable for unethical contracts, such as that of Project Nimbus, are being targeted and intentionally silenced. Google, alongside Amazon, has signed a contract worth $1.2 billion, titled “Project Nimbus”, which will provide a cloud system service for both the Israeli military and the Israeli government. Disturbingly, the project was announced May in 2021, the same month Israel killed at least 260 Palestinians in Gaza. Adding insult to injury, it was during this period that Amnesty International found Israel guilty of practising Apartheid against the Palestinian people.
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