Tumblroth

I had no idea until reading this post on Google’s public policy blog that the government notified companies when they were the subject of a Freedom of Information Act filing. I am reading this correctly, right?

Here’s the quote :

[S]everal individuals and organizations submitted Freedom of Information Act requests with the FCC seeking access to this information [a letter Google wrote to the FCC about Apple’s blocking of Google Voice for the iPhone]. While we could have asked the FCC to oppose those requests, in light of Apple’s decision to make its own letter fully public and in the interest of transparency, we decided to drop our request for confidentiality. Today the FCC posted the full content of our letter to their website (PDF).

There are three plausible ways Google could have learned about the requests:

1. The FCC contacted Google;

2. The FOIA filers cc’ed Google when writing the FCC;

3. Google FOIA’ed the FCC to see what kind of FOIAs were being requested.

If it’s the first, seems like a pretty screwed up system. I’ve submitted plenty of these requests and — I guess, naively — never realized that the people/companies I was investigating might have the chance to fight my request. Always figured it was some nameless bureaucrat giving the thumbs up or thumbs down.