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As through all good parodies, in that place’s a grain of truth in a fake intelligence story on the Web that says Bill Gates could face another antitrust investigation — this time for “monopolistic charity practices.”

With a $38 billion endowment that exceeds the manifest domestic product (GDP) of most countries it helps — and another $30 billion pledged through investor Warren Buffett — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has come to keep in subjection the kind world in the corresponding; of like kind advance Microsoft towered over the software landscape.

Yet the sum of two units organizations’ public personas couldn’t be more dissimilar.

While Microsoft has drawn equal measures of commendation and scorn for its business practices and products, the Seattle-based foundation gets lots of hugs and to a high degree scarcely any slaps. After wholly, what’s not to like about saving lives, fighting poverty and improving schools?

But philanthropy experts and even some settlement leaders are ill at ease by total the adulation.

“The danger isn’t in what people do tell you — it’s in what they don’t,” departing foundation CEO Patty Stonesifer warned in the 2007 annual report.

In other words, Stonesifer says, the Gates Foundation needs honest feedback and criticism to help it figure out how best to improve the health of the world’s poor, boost food production in Africa and improve schools in the U.S.

Honesty can be hard to come by, though, when you’re handing out staggering amounts of cash.

And more question how sincere the foundation is about listening to critics.

“They’re not really fostering tough debate,” said Pablo Eisenberg, a columnist towards The Chronicle of Philanthropy and senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. “They have not solicited and gone after people who force of will tell them the truth.”

Particularly in the field of global health, to what funding for diseases of the developing world was anemic before Gates’ $9.5 billion dollar instil lation, hardly any are willing to risk wrath by pointing out flaws in the foundation’s approach.

“It would be suicidal for someone who wants a grant to come out and publicly criticize the footing,” reported Mark Kane, previous leader of a Gates-funded program to expand childhood immunizations in the developing world. “The Gates Foundation is very sensitive to PR.”