Friends who don't work in the non-profit sector asked me about what Google's doing. I responded... Google is saying, correctly, that an entity can function as a charitable institution without signing on to the tax-exempt-status legal contract; they believe that declining that contract allows room to be a more effective charitable institution. Choosing to pay taxes is in their view simply buying more freedom to operate. One problem is that tax-exempt legal status is the only real guarantor of ongoing charitable intent and behavior: as someone in the article correctly points out, the continued charitable intent and action of google.org is entirely at the whim of Google's owners (its stockholders). Another problem is that political lobbying is not, in the view of our society, consistent with being a charitable institution; retaining the legal freedom to do so doesn't change this. (Something being legal does not necessarily make it moral.) Another flaw in their theory is that most of the things that they seem to think a tax-exempt organization can't do (lobbying excepted) are not in fact prevented by tax-exempt status -- venture capital investment, for example. A tax-exempt non-profit is not prohibited from being profitable, it is simply prevented from distributing said profits to anyone or any purpose other than its charitable mission. (A Girl Scouts council is obviously free to make net profits from selling the cookies, they simply have to spend all of such profits on their programs.) Foundations _do_ do venture capital investing, and so do major non-profits albeit they usually suck at it except for the big private universities. And if a non-profit does venture capital investing completely unrelated to its mission, that is _simply_ seeking net returns, then if successful it has to pay taxes on the profits anyway (UBIT). So...hmm. This isn't adding up. Leaves me wondering what the real agenda is here. It could be as simple as the egos of the founders -- I long ago stopped being surprised at the silly things that even smart, successful people often think is true about non-profits and philanthropy.