Google’s top executive is slated to meet with as many as two dozen House GOP lawmakers on Friday amid growing concerns in Congress over claims of anti-conservative bias, the company’s expansion plans in China and its user-privacy safeguards.
The huddle between Google’s Sundar Pichai, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other Republican members comes as the White House reportedly pushes a plan to open federal antitrust investigations into companies like Google and Facebook.
In a statement, Pichai said he was looking forward to “meeting with members on both sides of the aisle, answering a wide range of questions, and explaining our approach.”
The meetings, he said, “will continue Google’s long history of engaging with Congress, including testifying seven times to Congress this year.”
Google, which declined earlier this year to send a top executive to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee alongside Facebook and Twitter about privacy practices, disclosed last week that it still allows third-party developers to access users’ Gmail accounts. Conservatives have railed against the tech giant after President Trump suggested in August that it manipulates its search engine results to favor liberal media outlets, a claim Google has denied.
Lawmakers are also expected to press Pichai on the company’s plans to re-enter China.
The Google search engine can’t be used in China currently, due to a firewall the government puts up to block certain websites, but the company is reportedly working on a censored engine that would remove sensitive content to appease the communist regime. The platform is said to track users’ locations, personal phone numbers and other identifying information, arousing concerns that the company is effectively building a tool for the Chinese government.
Lawmakers including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., have blasted Google’s plans as troubling and said it implicates the company in “human rights abuses related to China’s rigorous censorship regime.”
While Google increases its lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill, Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday convened a group of state attorney generals to discuss potential anti-competitive behavior by Google, Facebook and others.
The nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said the actions by Sessions were “grossly inappropriate, undermine the free speech rights of tech platforms, and ultimately do a disservice to consumers.”
“When there are growing calls by foreign governments to censor and regulate the U.S. tech industry, unwarranted investigations by the U.S. government undermine the rights of these firms at home and legitimize threats from abroad,” Vice President Daniel Castro and researcher assistant Michael McLaughlin wrote in an op-ed in USA Today.
