14 DAY TRIAL // Unlike Google and Facebook, Yahoo is taking a careful approach to the topic of leaving the American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC.
While Google has accused the position ALEC has regarding global warming and climate change as the reason for why they’re cutting ties with the lobby group, Facebook has been more general and said that they had tried in vain to bring the organization closer to its own views on some key issues.
“At Yahoo, we engage in the political process in a variety of ways to promote and to protect the long-term interests of our users and our company. One of the ways we do so is through memberships in organizations that help advance our business objectives. We may not agree with all the positions of an organization, its leaders or its supporters,” a Yahoo spokesperson told Softpedia.
The company adds that Yahoo is member of ALEC and limits its engagement to the Communications and Technology Task Force, the same group that Google, Facebook and Microsoft were a part of.
“We periodically review the organizations with which we participate,” the company mentions, echoing the words coming from Facebook, which mentioned that they’re currently reevaluating all memberships they are engaged in. In light of everything that’s happened, they claim to be unlikely to renew their membership in 2015.
Google's Eric Schmidt says ALEC is lying about climate change
Google’s Eric Schmidt said ALEC was outright lying when it said that climate change was beneficial to the world and when they were rejecting the proof brought by scientists regarding the dangers we all faced.
“Everyone understands that climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And we should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying,” Google’s executive chairman said during a show.
ALEC has been involved in lobbying for various laws and writing model legislation that can be voted by politicians. They’ve expressed their opposition to the notion of net neutrality, choosing to urge regulators to allow ISPs to do whatever they want.
They’ve also been making it difficult for cities to compete against private ISPs by offering their own Internet service.
On top of this, as mentioned, they’re refusing to embrace scientific proof about global climate change and its dangers and asking schools to teach skepticism when it comes to this issue, or to outright deny that it’s a problem.