New York, USA (CU)_ Last year, more than $65 million was invested by Amazon, Facebook, Google and four other leading technology companies to lobby the US government, paying out huge amounts in trying to fight against antitrust scrutiny and new regulatory risks. According to an examination of federal lobbying reports that were released on Friday, Amazon spent about $18 million on lobbying in 2020, and Facebook spent almost $20 million, marking the most that either company has ever committed to promoting its political agenda in Washington. The companies released their final reports for the year 2020 on Thursday, representing the period between October 1 and December 31.
According to Amazon’s filing, the company’s spending burst coincided with its ever-growing corporate reach, as it tries to sell the government on its attempts to help distribute the coronavirus vaccine and other audacious gambits such as drone delivery. According to Facebook reports, during the period when the 2020 election brought another round of scrutiny to its content-management activities, including its attempts to search for misinformation and avoid voter intimidation, Facebook increased its lobbying.
In the meantime, Google continued to scale back its lobbying activities, contributing almost $8 million last year to its Washington operation. Similar to Amazon, Facebook and other tech companies, Google centered some of its attention on competition in the months after state and federal regulators filed a flurry of antitrust litigation against the largest firms in the tech industry. The documents show that including Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and Uber, the seven tech companies and their subsidiaries together invested $64.9 million in 2020.
The sustained lobbying drive of the tech industry represents its souring reputation in Washington, where lawmakers continued to bear down on Amazon, Facebook, Google and their peers last year because of their scale, influence and alleged mistakes. Democrats and Republicans have struggled to advance some of their most aggressive ideas, including attempts to tighten antitrust regulations and to make social media platforms more directly accountable for their content-moderation policies. But lawmakers say that this year, now that Biden is in the White House and Democrats dominate both the House and the Senate, they expect to participate in these debates again.
Michael Beckel, the research director for Issue One, which advocates for an overhaul of the country’s campaign finance and ethics laws, said, “There’s a lot of concern with how tech companies are handling disinformation, there’s a lot of concern about the ways tech companies are handling privacy. There’s a lot of policymakers and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle [that] are giving the tech industry more scrutiny. And with that increased scrutiny comes a desire to spend more on lobbying and make sure your side of the story is heard.”
