Eric Schmidt has applied to become a citizen of Cyprus
If this is indeed for a tax dodge, what&#x27;s funny is that the US Government helped fund Google. Or, more accurately, they funded the research into the seemingly esoteric problem that became Google;<p>&gt; In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.<p>&gt; The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?<p>Not to mention In-Q-Tel&#x27;s investment into one of their key products, Google Maps via Keyhole. And DARPA&#x27;s Grand Challenge that led to the Stanley car that was acquired and scaled up to make Google&#x27;s automated car division.<p>Google has done an admirable job of taking Government sponsored R&amp;D and maturing it into products. They deserve their success. But, in my opinion, the systemic lack of reinvestment into the pipeline that created them and their most successful products is equivalent to sawing off the branch that they&#x27;re sitting on.<p>The US Govt couldn&#x27;t have invented the iPhone or Google&#x27;s search engine, but they did fund the first Integrated Circuits, the first IC-based computer, the internet, GPS, discrete problems in computer science involving searching large amounts of data, display technologies, battery technologies, MEMS sensors etc etc.