Color us mildly surprised to find out some of Apple’s most staunch critics are on the take :

What most readers don’t know is that the Berkman Center and many of its leading professors have financial and personal ties to Google and other tech companies—ties that are not disclosed when these academics speak or publish, and that I discovered after auditing a class with Zittrain.

The class, it turned out, was funded by “a special grant from Microsoft,” according to Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer. Students were not made aware of Microsoft’s involvement.After finding out about the Microsoft grant, I became more curious about how academic work about the Internet is funded, and began asking the Berkman Center and Zittrain for more details. According to a statement provided on June 10 by Berkman co-directors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Google is the center’s top corporate backer and its fourth-largest donor (Harvard University is fifth), providing roughly $500,000 over the last two years to support an overall annual operating budget of approximately $5 million. Palfrey and Gasser say the Berkman project receiving the most financing from Google, StopBadware, is “now a separate 501(c)(3) entity,” but when I spoke to the project’s director, Maxim Weinstein, in May, Weinstein said he still works in Berkman-leased office space in Cambridge and that actual plans to phase out StopBadware’s relationship with Berkman are “fuzzy.”

Tags: Apple, Google, competitors, critics, secrets, disclosure, ethics