I think the really damning bit is:

> According to Frau-Meigs, independent funding for academics as well as journalists is extremely important. “Google and Facebook are paying these partnerships from their direct marketing arm, not through more neutral foundations,” she says.

This seems to be implying that Facebook and Google are paying these partnerships partly or mainly to coopt the researchers in order to avoid public relations or regulatory issues.

All of this “do good” nonsense FB and Google do is just another tool in their arsenal to support and serve their main business. They don’t care who it helps or hurts. They only care that these proxies help them.

> Monique Goyens ... 'We were blackmailed'

Blackmailing is telling people that you're been doing something illegal or immoral if you don't meet demands. Is the BEUC admitting here that they were doing something illegal or immoral?

Technically it’s extortion, of which blackmail is a type but not the right type. Cherry picking the wording feels pedantic here.

I’m not sure if this is legal and I think it varies by jurisdiction. For example, in the US I don’t think it’s actually legal to give donations to political offices contingent on them passing certain policies. You can, however, donate freely, imply you favor certain policies, show them more stacks of cash in your future lobbying fund, and wink.

No, I think the EU was inflammatory with wording: "heavy-arm wrestling in the corridors", "blackmail". At least in the US, you can't throw "blackmail" around casually as it carries a heavy criminal implication. We're talking about gifts and donations they have no rights to and that Facebook has no obligation to give.

Now the gifts themselves are a conflict of interest so they should never be allowed. Show of EU hands, who wants to outlaw all FB/GOOG gifts?

This is a case of wanting to bite the hand that feeds you and then whine when the hand yanks back the handouts too. Sure FB/GOOG plays a little dirty, but all corps/political states play this game.

> We're talking about gifts and donations they have no rights to and that Facebook has no obligation to give.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure this is true (everywhere or anywhere in particular). A donation has to be a donation, free of stipulations. If you say you intend to give a donation and you say that if you don't get certain policies then you won't give the donation; then its clear that you intend to receive a service for your donation, making it a business transaction (and potentially an illegal one).

As I said before, there are easy ways to accomplish the same thing. You're just not supposed to explicitly say "if you don't give me what I want, the money stops".

> blackmail, n.: the action, treated as a criminal offence, of demanding money from someone in return for not revealing compromising information which one has about them.

Compromising information could be information of various kinds, not all of that evidence of illegal or immoral deeds.

But there's no compromising information at all, is there?

Probably not a native English speaker.

Doesn't seem advisable to make serious legal statements if you're not confident in the language - let an expert speak on your behalf.

That's rich coming from someone who probably speaks one language.

99,9% of people understand what she means, even if it isn't the legally correct word. The other 0,01% are pedantics like yourself.

Furthermore there is no evidence that she used this word, the interview might've been in Dutch or French and translated by the authors.

> The other 0,01% are pedantics like yourself.

The noun is 'pedants'.

Was this said under oath or something?

I can think of several European languages where the native "blackmail" word would be used in a situation like this. But that's irrelevant, because this is not a forum of chatbots, is it? We can figure out what was meant, can't we?

Pointless nitpicking and wasting our time.

I'm guessing she meant to say, "We were extorted," which makes FB and Google look even worse.

That is a funny Freudian slip on her part for someone involved with the government.

Blackmail implies they were doing something illegal or immoral - extortion implies they were innocent and threatened.

Alternatively: a Belgian makes a mistake, one that is common even amongst natives, in a foreign language

could it be a machine translation from "chantage" to "blackmail" ? "chantage" in Dutch doesn't sound like it necessarily implies the target has committed a crime...

Actually the word should be 'bribe', shouldn't it?

> "if we did not stop talking about competition tools, Facebook would stop its support for journalistic [...] projects"

I don't see a downside.