3 ms·

Why do you assume lobbying == doing evil?

• biesnecker 14y ago
  Lobbying doesn't necessarily equate with doing evil, but it almost always equates with a person or group of people using their disproportionate power to push an agenda that individuals have little hope of pushing back on. Obviously the nature of the agenda itself is what makes it good or evil, and there are plenty of lobbyists that do work that I personally agree with, but at the same time I can step back and say that because of the way the system is set up that lobbying disempowers individuals with whom I disagree but who do not have access to similar resources, and that makes me uneasy.
  • AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >Lobbying doesn't necessarily equate with doing evil, but it almost always equates with a person or group of people using their disproportionate power to push an agenda that individuals have little hope of pushing back on. This assumes both that the ones doing the pushing aren't just pushing back against someone else, and that the someone else is a group of defenseless individuals rather than other corporate entities. If you think about where all this got started you can kind of see where all the money goes. On the one hand you have Microsoft waging a PR campaign against them and funding front companies to make questionable antitrust claims against them.[1] So then they have to spend money telling their side of that story to members of Congress before the smear campaign can influence legislation. Then you have Facebook doing much the same thing for different reasons.[2] And they'll be pushing different legislation, so now they've got to pay someone to talk to different legislators. At the same time, Apple is waging a patent war against Android, so now Google has got the incentive to go in and see if anything can be done to address the insanity that allows software to be patented in the U.S. And then there's Rupert Murdoch, who seems to think that Google is the cause of all that is wrong with internet and the destruction of the publishing industry, and wants to make search engines pay to link to other websites. And the RIAA/MPAA accusing them of facilitating piracy and trying to pass SOPA and PIPA. And that whole Google Books thing with the authors guild. And AT&T and Verizon wanting to monopolize payment processing on mobile devices and anticompetitively excluding Google Wallet, or violating the open access terms on the recent spectrum auction, or whatever else greedy utility companies like that can imagine to do to negatively impact Android. Oh, and China continues to harangue Google for not wanting to censor and so that they can advantage their own domestic search competitor, so now Google is under market pressure to go in and lobby the executive branch and try to get them to push back under the various trade treaties that ostensibly prohibit what China is doing. I don't mean to paint the picture as "poor defenseless Google getting picked on by everybody else" because they're hardly poor and defenseless, and "don't be evil" doesn't mean that they're a bunch of saints or that you should trust them -- but holy crap. That's a lot of political fronts to be fighting at the same time. You can kind of see how it could be pretty expensive. [1] http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/ http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money... [2] http://www.wired.com/business/2011/05/facebook-google-smear/ http://www.wired.com/business/2011/05/facebook-google-smear/