Hey, big vendor: Oracle, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook blow even more cash on lobbying American tech giants have ramped up the amount of cash they spend on lobbying US lawmakers to get their own way, yet again. As congressmen consider regulating organizations from Facebook to Google, and mull antitrust crackdowns against Amazon, said corporations have responded by flinging more dosh at the problem. The money is …
We should have a law like that in the UK - that would make really interesting reading.
There is a UK Lobbying Register, and (as ever) a civil servant who glories in the title of Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists. However, a simple search of the register for terms like Amazon, Alphabet, Google produced precisely zero results (I didn't dig down further to see if there's more detail that would help). Membership appears to be voluntary, so they might as well not have bothered.
Ministers have to disclose companies they've met with, but civil servants, regulators and other parts of the apparatus of government don't have the same obligation. So you needn't meet with politicians at all, and could influence policy by meetings with the bureaucrats - in fact, in my work alongside the "corporate affairs" team of a large company, I can assure you that actual face to face engagement with politicians is probably less than 5% of all lobbying activity. Take the recent proposals announced by government to change stamp duty on houses to include some complicated energy efficiency element. That was announced by government as their proposal, but I know where it came from, and who it came from, and they are a senior manager in a large energy company. The energy company are trying to loosen their obligations under various government energy efficiency requirements, and this idea was floated through influential industry talking shops, then with regulators, then with civil servants, who in turn drip feed it to the politicians, who then adopt it. Nobody agreed a back room deal face to face with a minister, or even a backbencher. But you can see that the lobbying was subtle, invisible and effective.
And that's part of the problem - lobbying is not just about direct contacts with politicians, or necessarily the civil servants - using third parties, tame academics or industry working groups is often the most effective way of influencing government. And that makes me deeply suspicious of the reported lobbying figures from these companies - on the basis of my UK knowledge, I reckon that they will be correct by the official US definitions of lobbying, but in reality are out by something like an order of magnitude.
The money declared on lobbying is just what they pay to the lobbyists to operate. I would guess that besides lobbyists' salaries and bonuses that is mostly entertainment and hospitality for the politicians being lobbied to. I wonder about the undeclared money that goes directly or indirectly to the politicians themselves.
It is actually amazing not that politicians are so easily influenced, but how cheaply. These companies are making billions in profits, it's not difficult to imagine that hundreds of millions of those profits are a result of a few million (chump change for these companies) spent on lobbying. By ROI% it's surely the most effectively spent money that these companies spend.
Facebook, Google, and Apple are (presumably) lobbying for stuff that favors their business (i.e. net neutrality, not making some crazy anti-encryption laws, etc.) not trying to get the government to give them more money / protect the money the government is currently giving them like Oracle.
So far in 2017, the iPhone maker has spent $5.46m bending lawmakers' ears.
That might well be down to fighting the FBI over access to the iPhone.
Their stance on privacy is good for the whole phone market. Imagine the total mauling that Apple would have got from Wall St (and even worse here..?) if they had caved in and given the Feds a backdoor into the data on every iPhone... That would have soon spread to Android devices and then where would 90% of us be eh?
Not a huge fan of Apple but their concerns for user data privacy is IMHO their one redeming quality.
Why the shock? We’re a capitalist democracy...
Everyone is created equal, but we only respect the all mighty dollar.
Oops... that philosophy got us Trump as President.
But not to worry, this is all the “above board” stuff.
Hey look there’s Saudi Arabia... wow what a large wallet you have.
Who would you like us to invade next? Yes... don’t worry about it, we’re willing to spend lives for dollars. Great! We have the perfect location for your new hotel all picked out.
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