No matter if it’s mobile related or not, tech companies are lobbying Washington more than ever. With Silicon Valley lobbying the nation’s capital on a number of different issues, ranging from the NSA to Immigreation law, tech giants are spending big to make sure their voices are head and their interests taken care of. Throughout 2012 lobbying spending was pretty high, but figures for 2013 are now in and it shows that tech companies are spending more money than ever. Google led the pack by spending the most, with the sizable budget of $14.06 million sent Washington’s way. Paradoxically, this was actually a decrease from of 14.7 percent from the amount spent in 2012. So, with Google still spending the most amount of money, how have other big industry players responded?
As Consumer Watchdog notes, the total is a little higher than $61 Million and while Google makes up the Lion’s share of that, most big names spent more in 2013 than in previous years. Microsoft increased their spending by 30 percent, coming in at $10.49 Million spent last year. Yahoo! had a small increase of 1 percent which brought their spending up to $2.78 Million. While Microsoft and Google are the big spenders when you take a look at the figures, Apple and Facebook had the biggest increases of 72 and 61 percent, respectively. Those massive increases however only created a budget of $3.37 Million for lobbying from Apple and $6.43 Million from Facebook.
The full list makes for some interesting reading, and as usual comes down to the same old thing; the more money you have, the bigger a difference you can make. Throughout 2012, Google was subject to an Antitrust investigation, and as a result spent $16.48 Million lobbying the capital. It seemed to have had the right effect, as Google didn’t face any action from the FTC in the end. Needless to say though, this sort of spending is only going to increase. While the increase in spending from 2013 to 2012 wasn’t as large as the increase from 2011 to 2012 (Facebook spent 196% more on lobbying in 2012 than in 2011) more money will continue to be spent lobbying the lawmakers.
Via: The Verge
Source: The Consumer Watchdog