Google's leading lobbyist in Washington resigns

WASHINGTON: Google's main lobbyist in Washington departs from the fact that the US tech company is being criticized at Capitol Hill over issues such as privacy and its investment plans in China, the division announced on Friday. Alphabet Inc.

Former US Representative Susan Molinari, who heads Google's office in Washington and her US policy team for the Americas for nearly seven years, will take up a new senior advisory role in January, the company said in a statement. . Google is looking for a new policy officer for the Americas, he added.

"I'm comfortable making the transition," said Molinari, 60, vice president of the House Republican Conference, before resigning from Congress in 1997 to become the morning news presenter on CBS. She added in a statement that she was "looking for the right moment to step back".

Republicans and Democrats have criticized Alphabet for refusing to send CEO Larry Page, or Google CEO Sundar Pichai, to the Senate in September.

In September, Pichai canceled a trip to Asia to meet legislators and agreed to testify before Congress later this year.

Google has also been confronted this year with numerous accusations by President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders that his research results promote content criticizing conservatives and demoting right-wing media outlets, which Google denies.

Legislators have wondered whether it would accept China's censorship requirements as it plans to return to the search engine market. Last month, Vice President Mike Pence called on Google to abandon the Chinese project.

Pichai said at a forum on Thursday that the project was "more of an experience" and reiterated that there was "nothing imminent" about the eventual launch of the project. a search engine in China.

In June, Google hired Karan Bhatia to lead the global policy of General Electric Co. Bhatia served as US Deputy Trade Representative to former President George W. Bush. The company also named Pablo Chavez, a Microsoft Corp lobbyist and former Republican assistant John McCain, as the main lobbyist in June.

Alphabet announced last month that it would close the mainstream version of its faulty Google+ social network and tighten its data sharing rules after announcing that the private profile data of at least 500,000 users would have been exposed to hundreds of external developers.

"Google must be more open with the public and lawmakers if it wants to maintain or regain the trust of users of its services," said three elderly Republicans to a letter of October 11. They said they were "particularly disappointed" by the fact that Google did not reveal the problem at a hearing on privacy two weeks earlier.

In 2012, Google agreed to pay a record civil fine of $ 22.5 million to settle the Federal Trade Commission's charges that it would have misled Apple's Safari Internet browser users that it would not place "cookies" "follow up nor would they serve as targeted ads.

(Report by David Shepardson, additional report by Paresh Dave in San Francisco, edited by Richard Chang)