For the first time since records began in 1998, technology firms have topped the list of the biggest spenders on lobbying. Between them, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple spent a cumulative $50 million on getting their cases across to America’s elected politicians in Washington.
Topping the list was Google, spending $18 million on lobbying congress, federal agencies and the White House, according to disclosures filed to the Senate Office of Public Records. Their main areas of interest? Lobbying on immigration, tax reform and antitrust laws saw the search giant’s spend rise by almost 17%.
Next up: Amazon. The online retailer spent $13 million in lobbying in 2017, up 16% on its 2016 spend. The firm lobbied on tax reform, immigration and specifically its acquisition of Whole Foods.
Facebook followed, with around $11 million of federal lobbying spend (up 32%) – largely on the topics of online advertising, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), net neutrality and tax policy. Apple made the biggest increase, upping its lobbying game by 51%, but still spending a relatively modest $7 million on lobbying over medical apps, driverless cars and action on climate change.
The Big Four’s increased spending gives the Washington lobbying industry a far more technology-focused flavour, squeezing out the usually big players of telecom, energy and defence contractors.
On one hand, this is bad news if you worry about the growing influence of tech behemoths on government policy. But if it’s any consolation, they didn’t get great value from their millions this time…
The limits of lobbying: Nobody factored in a Trump presidency
I’ve written before about how governments around the world are pressing for a big battle with technology, blissfully unaware that they’d already fought and lost years before they knew what the stakes were. You just have to look at the unedifying spectacle of US lawmakers grossly sucking up to Amazon in a bid for their region to get the company’s second HQ to see the results of that in action.
Trump’s presidency – as it has with so many other things – appears to have turned the rules of the game on their head. Or at least moved the goalposts considerably. Just look at the areas that Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook really care about and you can see that $50 million of lobbying has amounted to a very small hill of beans indeed. Net neutrality is dead, immigration reforms that threaten the company’s staff look set to go ahead, and the less said about climate change the better, where President Trump is concerned.
While there were victories in there – the tax plans were a win for most Silicon Valley firms, while Amazon scored a major victory in a tiny section of the National Defense Authorisation Act – you get the impression that for the most part the tech industry is discovering what commentators like myself assumed for a long time: the Trump administration is very hard to influence.
That sounds like a positive, and I suppose you could take it that way if you worry about the poisonous influence of lobbying on politics (side note: this episode of This American Life is eye-opening on the subject). Careful what you wish for, though: to my mind, it points less to a driven sense of civic duty, and more to a dysfunctional White House led by a president with a notoriously short attention span.
The evidence is all around, from the sheer number of sackings to reports of warring factions vying for the president’s ear. And as for Trump’s attention span, where do you start? The president is largely influenced by the last person he spoke to, or the last TV programme he watched. No matter how much you spend, lobbyists can’t be on Trump’s shoulder 24 hours a day, like a shoulder angel in a comic strip, waiting for the first sign of a flip-flop. Even foreign governments aren’t immune, as Theresa May found when she thought she’d drawn an unequivocal commitment to NATO from the president only to discover it wasn’t worth that much.
And that’s not even considering his ability to bear a grudge against those he has perceived to have wronged him. See his ongoing vendetta against Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, which threatens to overrule even the most persistent of lobbyists.
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Will throwing more lobbying money at the problem work? Unlikely. Tech firms are probably better off taking their $50 million lobbying spend and redirecting it to buy adverts in between segments of Fox and Friends. An alarming amount of presidential policy seems to stem from there, rather than the career politicians that Google et al are wasting their influence upon.
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