Topic: lobbying
Google Pays Professors and Researchers to Produce Pro-Google Papers (Jul 11, 2017)
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Google, in Post-Obama Era, Aggressively Woos Republicans – The New York Times (Jan 27, 2017)
Two politics stories today, as this one follows the Facebook story from earlier. This one also echoes an earlier story about big tech companies rethinking their political alliances both in the face of a possible shift to the right and now in the wake of an actual take over of both the executive and legislative branches by Republicans. It’s easy to see this as a swing from left to right, but I think it’s better seen as pragmatism about working with whoever is in power. The wrinkle is that Google had particularly strong ties with the Obama administration at multiple levels, and Eric Schmidt in particular was involved with the Clinton campaign, at least indirectly. Google / Alphabet arguably has the most to fear of the major tech companies from a backlash against tech companies based on their support for Democrats, and is clearly doing all it can to make nice now. Having said all that, the degree to which companies have to worry about such a backlash is surely much higher under this administration than any previous one.
SpaceX, Uber Reach New Heights In Lobbying Spending – BuzzFeed (Jan 25, 2017)
These numbers get crunched every year, and are always an insight into the sometimes complex relationship between tech companies and the US government, as well as the very different strategies pursued by the various companies – Apple spends far less than some of its peers (less even than Facebook, which is a fraction of its size), while Google is always a big spender. The other thing I’m always struck by is the relatively tiny size of the spending – even Google’s $15.4m lobbying spending is minuscule in the context of its overall business – Apple’s spend was a fraction of a hundredth of a percent of its revenue for the year. It’s also interesting to see which issues the companies lobbied on: Apple lobbied mostly on technical issues directly related to its business, while Google lobbied more broadly on trade and immigration policy as well as several technical topics. All this will obviously potentially get a lot more complicated under the new administration, which has so far had a much more adversarial tone towards big tech companies than its predecessor.
via BuzzFeed