>The State Department arranges lots of these "CEO tours" all the time. Are they secretly working on foreign policy, or, are they trying to open up exports, or sell people on American capitalism?

What's the difference? They both support the agenda of the supporting governments.

>Just because the trip is arranged on behalf of the State Department doesn't make the agenda wrong

Right, but without transparency to indicate one or the other people are likely to perceive the meddling of a specific government within a company that deals with international business to be troublesome/worrying.

>Assange wants to play "connect the dots" to imply something nefarious going on, but if Angelina Jolie were in the same meetings instead of Eric Schmidt, what would Assange be saying?

Does Angelina Jolie have something to do with the world's largest store of personal information, or do you somehow think that Schmidt's influence comes from his celebrity rather than his influence inside one of the world's biggest economic powers?

Angelina Jolie, and celebrities like her, are used to influence the public. Celebrities like Schmidt are powerful because they are leveraging the power of their respective domains.

If I were Assange, i'd probably conclude that the use of a celebrity like Angelina Jolie was for the purposes of controlling a populous or influencing 'the masses' opinion -- but i'm not Assange, and Jolie is tangential.

> Nothing in his commentary actually zeros in on anything Google has done based on these supposed connections that's bad (leaving aside the wrong claims about how PRISM works)

Enduring Security Framework, NSA tool contracts, GeoEye-1 sharing(Both the gov and Google paid for half of the satelite, but the 16 inch resolution imagery is only available for gov use. How's that for fair?), Google's membership within the Defense Industrial Base (“products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations.”), the rental of Google's front page to the state ("Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria"), and the government support of Schmidt as some sort of official Ambassador for back-channel influence of negotiating parties.

Did you just skim past all that, or do you think that none of this is cause for concern?

>it is not an oil company, it does not harvest raw resources from foreign companies, and it doesn't make hardly any revenue from selling services to the US government. There's not much US government favors can do for it's bottom line.

Google harvests raw resources in the form of data-mining, and turns those resources into a product worth value. The value that it accrues from the US government is not in the form of revenue, but rather in the form of access -- access to those in power and access to business tactics and resources that are above and beyond the treatment of most businesses by the US government.

>You need the US empire for that, you don't necessarily need it to protect virtual assets.

That's far from true. Past large groups did not only depend on the US to protect their physical product, but also to protect their position in the market (if government subsidized usually), to protect their methodologies, and in some cases protect their IP.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

an act, widely considered to have been unconstitutional, voted on by voice, which was created by the reasoning that "copyright industries are one of the largest trade surpluses for the state"

If lobbyists can succeed in increasing a held copyright by 50 years to a 120 year total it doesn't take much imagination to understand why a company may want to be in bed with their host government.

>What would be the incentive for Google to risk a tens of billion-a-quarter business on some quid-pro-quo for the US Government or Eric Schmidt's vanity?

the continued permission to exist as a company and not a fragmented post anti-trust mess?

>My point is, Google has more important things to worry about on a day to day basis. They're more worried about competitors like Apple, than some weak ass benefits some association with bureaucrats might provide.

Google does, but Schmidt doesn't. That's why the assertion that Schmidt is a puppet ambassador for the US government came about -- because he and his highly-political cadre of followers (cabinet?) go from country to country on state sponsored tours, apparently while espousing pro-US/surveillance talking points with the world's leaders.

>Google Ideas isn't Google

What? It may not be the whole of Google, but isn't that a bit silly?