With lawmakers ramping up the debate over privacy, antitrust and legal protections that tech platforms rely on, tech companies are unleashing some of the Washington power they’ve spent the past few years building up. (1/8)
Every one of those think tanks and advocacy groups is backed by Google, Facebook or both. The companies are not only two of the main targets of Hawley’s bill, but they’re also the focus of broader political scrutiny that now spans both parties and has spilled over into the Democratic presidential race.
With lawmakers ramping up debate over privacy, antitrust and, in Hawley’s case, legal protections the platforms rely on, the Silicon Valley giants are unleashing some of the Washington power they’ve spent the past few years building up, going from a low-key player into the biggest spender in D.C. And while tech-funded think tanks and advocacy groups have fought other initiatives, the fervor over Hawley’s bill has revealed just how well powerful companies have laid the foundation in Washington to fight efforts to rein them in.
"I’ve never seen pushback in such a fashion before," Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, told NBC News."Even with net neutrality, these groups were all over the place — even though Facebook and Google supported it. It’s safe to say that it’s largely due to pressure from the social media giants that hasn’t been seen before.
In recent years — after relatively little interaction between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill — Google and Facebook have ramped up their spending on lobbying, with both companies spending more on such services in 2018 than in any year prior, data from the Center for Responsive Politics showed.
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