Twenty-four years ago, a
young Indian engineer named Sundar Pichai boarded a plane for the first
time, to fly to Pittsburgh. Thursday, he returned to Pittsburgh as CEO
of Google, and announced plans to give away $1 billion.
The
money will go to projects that offer training and career coaching to
people short on skills for a rapidly digitizing economy where businesses
and their workers need fluency in coding, mobile apps, and social media
to compete. Google says it has already given out $100 million of the
total to nonprofits, including $10 million to Goodwill, for a program
offering digital-skills training. A "Grow With Google tour" will spin up
training events staffed by Google employees across the country, after
Pittsburgh comes Indianapolis.
“The nature of
work is fundamentally changing,” Pichai said in a blog post today. “It’s
a big problem and, at Google, whenever we see a big problem, we ask how
we can make it easier for everyone to solve it.”
It’s
arguable that Google might have seen this problem coming—services like
its search engine, smartphone software, and video platform YouTube are
contributing to those changes in work. Google’s philanthropic dollars
are arriving just as policy makers and regulators previously favorable or indifferent to tech companies are beginning to take a more jaundiced view of the sector.
Google’s
new initiative has echoes of earlier giveaways that pledged
philanthropic dollars towards helping people adjust to changes wrought,
in part, by Google.
The
success of Google’s search engine and its associated ads have come at
the expense of traditional media publishers, who’ve seen their own ad
revenue plunge. Some publishers, particularly in Europe, have clashed
with Google over how the company features their content in its web and
news search products.
In 2015, Google announced
it would give €150 million to European journalism projects and
newsrooms, for training and reporting projects. In September, Google
announced further philanthropic support to journalism. It is supporting a
scheme called Report for America that will cover 50 percent of the
salaries of 1,000 reporters in local newsrooms across the U.S. in an
attempt to improve local coverage.
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