Soon, Open Markets—and its staff of 10—will be spun out of New America and will stand on its own.

Those are the well-established public facts. What happened next is what’s up for debate.

The Times article says that Schmidt saw the June note Lynn posted to the New America website and “communicated his displeasure” to Slaughter. The statement came down, then went back up without explanation. A few days later, Slaughter asked to meet with Lynn, and—somehow—it was decided his group would leave New America. She then sent him an email that he shared with the Times.

The Times wrote that the email said “the decision was ‘in no way based on the content of your work,’” but but also noted that “Slaughter accused Lynn of ‘imperiling the institution as a whole.’”

While the Times leaves out the context of the “imperiling” remark, a plain reading of the excerpts—and the fact that the email was sent at all—suggests a leader panicked about the loss of the institution’s most important constellation of funders.

Shortly after the story broke, Slaughter said on Twitter, “This story is false. New America will issue statement shortly. We are proud of Open Markets work.”

Slaughter’s longer statement emphasized that the spin-out was occasioned by Lynn’s “repeated refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality,” which is how educated people say, “He was an asshole.” (Neither Slaughter nor Lynn immediately replied to my request for an interview Wednesday. Nor did a representative for New America.)

Update: New America has released the full text of three emails from Slaughter to Lynn. A charitable reading of Slaughter’s position is that it was not Lynn’s work itself—indeed she offers to keep his team on doing their same research—but his behavior around the presentation of his work. Slaughter tells Lynn that he’s being pushed out not “based on any response from Google” but because of a “pattern” of “telling me one thing and doing another.”

In the Times, Google disputed that it had anything to do with Open Markets leaving New America.

If it all sounds like an inside-baseball Washington-power story, that’s because it is. But that doesn’t make it unimportant. This is one way that the future of the nation’s economy is being decided.

Whether Alphabet, Amazon, and others are treated as special entities, regular old companies, or monopolists is a key factor in determining what the internet will look like in the coming years.

The story comes at a time when Alphabet’s influence, in particular, is under intense scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal used research from the Google Transparency Project, an advocacy group funded by Alphabet’s competitors, to run a splashy story on Google buying “academic influence.” Journalists have noted that tech companies, after ignoring Washington for years, have been spending as much as or more on lobbying than anybody else. Hundreds of Googlers have gone into or come out of the government, too, in one of the better examples of the old “revolving door” between corporate and government work.

All of which makes the undisputed facts of the case enough to tell the story. Maybe Eric Schmidt sent Anne-Marie Slaughter an email or a text message saying, “WTF?” with a link to Lynn’s post. Or even just an email with the link. But even if he didn’t, is anyone to believe that the institutional apparatus of New America would not be aware that one of its units was directly targeting the business model of a major funder and allied entity?