Corporate America silenced researchers before. Now they're doing it again | Marshall Steinbaum

A storm has erupted around the dismissal of Barry Lynn, a Silicon Valley critic, from his Google-funded thinktank. We have every reason to be concerned

• Marshall Steinbaum is a fellow and research director at the Roosevelt Institute, where he researches market power and inequality

Barry Lynn is an outspoken critic of the concentration of power in Silicon Valley. And as of this week, he is more than that. He's a dissident, rousted out and crushed by the might of Big Tech's accumulated economic, political and intellectual power.

Lynn, who is a colleague, worked for a major Washington thinktank - New America - which publishes policy recommendations on how to regulate the tech industry. It receives a considerable amount of money from Google, a company which Lynn and his team have repeatedly criticized. That uncomfortable fact is why his dismissal made waves in Washington DC and beyond.