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Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me [Updated]The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was “imperiling the institution,” the Times reported, after he and his group had repeatedly criticized Google, a major funder of the think tank, for its market dominance. The criticism of Google had culminated in Lynn posting a statement to the think tank’s website “applauding” the European Commission’s decision to slap the company with a record- breaking $2. That post was briefly taken down, then republished. Soon afterward, Anne- Marie Slaughter, the head of New America, told Lynn that his group had to leave the foundation for failing to abide by “institutional norms of transparency and collegiality.”Google denied any role in Lynn’s firing, and Slaughter tweeted that the “facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.” Despite the conflicting story lines, the underlying premise felt familiar to me: Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished. I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job.
In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then- new social network, Plus. The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers. This sounded like a news story to me. Google’s dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network. I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer?
The answer was yes. After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google.
With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting. The Google guys explained how the new recommendation system will be a factor in search. Universally, or just among Google Plus friends?” I asked. Universal’ was the answer. So if Forbes doesn’t put +1 buttons on its pages, it will suffer in search rankings?” I asked. Google guy says he wouldn’t phrase it that way, but basically yes.(An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.)Google promptly flipped out.
This was in 2. 01. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non- disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. I had signed no such agreement, hadn’t been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher- ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down.
· Ask any entrepreneur what the most important task of building a company from scratch is and they’ll likely say recruiting. Ask an entrepreneur what the. The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open. Investopedia is the world's leading source of financial content on the web, ranging from market news to retirement strategies, investing education to insights from.
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The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. I thought it was an important story, but I didn’t want to cause problems for my employer.
And if the other participants in the meeting had in fact been covered by an NDA, I could understand why Google would object to the story. Given that I’d gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down—a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all.
As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly. And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. It’s possible that Forbes, and not Google, was responsible for scrubbing the cache, but I frankly doubt that anyone at Forbes had the technical know- how to do it, as other articles deleted from the site tend to remain available through Google.
Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet. I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance, but it’s part of why this episode has haunted me for years: The story Google didn’t want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google. Google wouldn’t address whether it deliberately deep- sixed search results related to the story. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson sent a statement saying that Forbes removed the story because it was “not reported responsibly,” an apparent reference to the claim that the meeting was covered by a non- disclosure agreement. Again, I identified myself as a journalist and signed no such agreement before attending. People who paid close attention to the search industry noticed the piece’s disappearance and wroteaboutit, wondering why it disappeared. Those pieces, at least, are still findable today.
As for how effective the strategy was, Google’s dominance in other industries didn’t really pan out for Plus. Six years later, the social network is a ghost town and Google has basically given up on it. But back when Google still thought it could compete with Facebook on social, it was willing to play hardball to promote the network.
Google started out as a company dedicated to ensuring the best access to information possible, but as it’s grown into one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, its priorities have changed. Even as it fights against ordinary people who want their personal histories removed from the web, the company has an incentive to suppress information about itself.
Google said it never urged New America to fire Lynn and his team. But an entity as powerful as Google doesn’t have to issue ultimatums. It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants, given the influence it wields.
Nate Paul: Real estate mogul with a $8. Image: Tim Pannell for Forbes. Unlike other successful millennial entrepreneurs, Nate Paul is not a T- shirt or hoodie kind of guy—his uniform is a suit. He has worn one to work, usually with a vest, every day since he dropped out of college nearly 1.
I always wanted people to take me seriously,” the Texas real estate prodigy says. Part of it is you have to look older.”At 5’1. Paul certainly looks as though his odometer has long since passed 3. But that’s not why the real estate brokers who clamour to meet him take him seriously. They try to get in the elevator that rises to the top floor of Austin’s tallest commercial skyscraper, up past the offices of billionaire- run private equity firms, because Paul is the biggest buyer and owner of land for development in the city.
And Texas isn’t big enough for his ambition. Paul’s World Class Holding, which he started building in 2. Forbes. That portfolio includes 1. California to New York, but most are in economically vibrant Texas.
World Class Holding owns 1. And although he once bid $8. Manhattan’s Plaza and Dream hotels, Paul is no Texas Trump—he doesn’t own a single trophy building and his name is not on any of his properties. My assets are not sexy,” the 3. I mean, I own lots of storage. But I love my assets.”For good reason. Paul, who retains 1.
Based on his holdings inside and outside the company, Forbes estimates that Paul’s net worth is $8. If commercial real estate prices stay strong, he could be a billionaire soon. It’s a particularly impressive trajectory when you consider that real estate is famously a dynastic business and Paul is the son of an obstetrician- gynecologist. Complicating things further, he is the son of Indian immigrants in overwhelmingly white Austin. From the beginning, Paul set out to build his portfolio as an operator and an investor.
In order to buy, he hit up his obstetrician father’s buddies, charmed high- net- worth individuals, and then landed pension and insurance money. He raised funds in dozens of partnerships to do deals and kept upwards of 5. With the $2. 5 million he started raising from the Austin Police Retirement System in 2. Now Paul is getting ready to double down on his early success.
He has spent much of the past year recapitalising his business, cashing out limited partners (such as the Austin Police Retirement System) and taking full ownership of many of World Class’s partnerships, often using debt and his own accumulated capital. He then rolled up all the properties he could into his new holding company, which is attempting to raise $1 billion of preferred equity in the coming year. Paul thought about trying to raise a private equity fund, but what he really wants is permanent capital, which would allow him to get off the treadmill that requires him to sell assets to achieve exits for his investors every few years.
I am thinking with a 3. Paul says. “I actually have a 3. Dressing the part: The 3. Paul started wearing suits as a teen so people would take him seriously. Dead In 5 Heartbeats Movie Watch Online. His sister even bought him a pair of suit pajamas—and she was only half- kidding.
Image: Tim Pannell for Forbes“From an investment perspective his returns have been spectacular, and he does a good job returning capital early,” says Robert Smith, an Austin private equity billionaire who has invested tens of millions in five of Paul’s deals. I look at what Nate has accomplished; he has thought very strategically about areas like storage and the Austin marketplace.”Joseph Liemandt, founder and CEO of Austin’s Trilogy Software, adds, “His general business acumen is unbelievable, and he is always talking about the long term.” Liemandt, a close friend of Paul’s who, at 2. Forbes cover highlighting the wave of young tech entrepreneurs, says, “He is dramatically more mature than I ever was—nobody thought he was 2. Driving around his hometown in a Bentley, Paul proudly points out key development properties he owns in the heart of Austin.
There is the parking lot and two- storey building being leased by Google Fiber sitting on 1. The family who owned it for 7. Paul and called him with four days left in 2. A block away he owns another low- rise building, which he bought for $5 million in 2. Capital Grille restaurant to the site. Paul drives toward another two properties near the Austin Convention Center. Overall, he has accumulated entitlements to build 6 million square feet in downtown Austin.
Making his way southeast to the popular Rainey Street district, where historic bungalows have been converted into funky bars, Paul points out a property zoned for 7. He purchased another property down the road last year that has only a small building with an International House of Pancakes outlet as a tenant. Imagine if you are a tech company that wants to be in downtown Austin—this is a supercool area to be in,” says Paul, vowing to start building an office within a year. Victoria, Texas, where Paul was born, is about a two- hour drive from most of these properties. As the youngest child of immigrants, Paul was raised to believe that school was a priority for him and his two older siblings.
Born Natin, he shortened his name to Nate, but that didn’t exactly help with assimilation. People in small- town Texas often thought he was Hispanic, and young Nate would not correct them. People look at you and you are not white, you are not black, you are something in between,” he recalls. As a kid he was “always selling something, trying to do some sort of business”—working as a DJ, selling rubber bracelets, hawking personalised water bottles. Paul left home in 2. Catholic prep school in Austin. He played basketball, was good at math and started a business out of a local Barnes & Noble tutoring kids from the suburbs.
At that point, everything was going according to his parents’ plan, and Paul eventually attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied business. With his sister, Sheena, he even won a business case- study competition in Thailand. But Paul was restless and had already started channeling his energy toward real estate. He would spend hours studying foreclosed properties, building data sets that included appraised values and loan balances, then head down to the county courthouse on the first Tuesday of each month to see how the auctions turned out.
After his freshman year, Paul was ready to drop out but knew his mom would take it badly. My mother would say, ‘Doctor or lawyer,’” he recalls in his slight Texas twang. His older siblings were firmly on the track their parents desired—his brother eventually became a plastic surgeon, his sister an attorney—so Paul decided to take a year off with a promise that he would go back to school one day. Renting a basement office, he called his firm World Class Capital, a name for which he has sometimes gotten grief but reflects the idealism of a 2.
I just wanted it to be great,” he says. While Paul may have good timing with the booming economy of Austin—the nation’s fastest- growing big city since 2. Paul from getting into the real estate business. And after he started doing deals in his early 2.
Paul straight up that he would not do business with him given his ethnicity. And one banker refused to lend to him because of a bad experience she claimed to have once had with an Indian. The adversity I faced in building my business pales in comparison to the challenges that my father faced as an Indian immigrant in the ’7.
Victoria, Texas,” he says. The first property Paul acquired, in 2.