Lobbyists rewrote Washington state’s privacy law | Hacker News Reader

Lobbyists rewrote Washington state’s privacy law

politico.eu

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"In the final draft circulated among local lawmakers last week, which was obtained by POLITICO, Ryan Harkins, a senior public policy director at Microsoft, also wrote notes in the margins, often chiding lawmakers for their legislative approach and deleting sections of the bill that he viewed as unsatisfactory."

Lobbying is pure corruption. No individual citizens or even organizations have such power to strike paragraphs from a draft law. Even assuming that those edits would be ignored, they bias the legislators against public interests.

That’s a perverted view of the “public interest” as being diametrically opposed to corporate interests. Microsoft is a major employer in Washington. Not to mention, it’s one of the nation’s major innovators, making products everyone uses. It’s views on proposed legislation are extremely relevant and helpful and it’s in the “public interest” for legislators to consider them.

Note that some of the provisions in question would have been a huge boon to plaintiffs’ attorneys:

> While the state's attorney general had called for the inclusion of a right for individuals to sue companies for potential wrongdoing, such a provision was eventually not included in the final proposals. Financial penalties — much-needed teeth to ensure compliance — were capped at just $7,500 for each intentional violation and $2,500 for any unintended infractions.

Violations are generally construed to be “per user.” So a single unintentional error could result in a huge penalty. Creating a private cause of action would have created a huge incentive to turn every unintentional error into a class action lawsuit.

It's in the public interest for legislators to consider those views alongside the views of the general public. Unfortunately the latter does not have the resources to lobby as effectively as Microsoft does…

Draft legislation in Washington is publicly available. Anyone (including privacy groups) could submit a redline markup. To the extent that the legislature might prioritize the views of Microsoft isn’t corruption, it’s common sense. The EU created a heavy handed data privacy law because it would be American companies that would feel most of the compliance burden. When you are Washington state and one those companies is in your own back yard, the calculus is different.

This is the exactly sort of scenario where lobbying is important. “Privacy” sounds good in the abstract. It’s like “think of the children.” Who could be against more privacy? But what’s going to be the impact on local businesses? On the products people buy?

> because it would be American companies that would feel most of the compliance burden.

How so? You seem to be just repeating the common narrative in US, which isn't based in any factual data.

A draft being publicly available does not in any way mean it has the influence of a highly paid, well connected lobbyist. The point being that lobbying is highly effective, and the public has little chance of having it's voice heard.

I hear you say: 'the voice of the people is heard at election time'. This would be the case if the very same lobbyist didn't fund the campaigns of politicians.

If money can buy influence in policy making, that is textbook corruption.

The other part to this is that the current (American) political system is built on top of this form of corruption, it is an integral part. I would draw a parallel to the Brazilian political system, which simply couldn't function without the corruption it is built upon. Of course the American case isn't as bad, but nor is it particularly good.

Lobbying isn’t “fund[ing] the campaigns of politicians.” It’s about making PowerPoint presentations to politicians’ staff.

And making large donations to reelection campaigns.

That’s just not true. To the extent lobbyists make donations, they do so in their individual, rather than representative capacity. Look at open secrets’ list of top lobbyists: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=lb&showY.... They’re not making “large donations.” Some of the top lobbyists contributed nothing. Most a few hundred to a few thousand, which is not out of line for DC residents in that economic stratum generally. In a typical election year, donations by federal registered lobbyists amount to $10-20 million total: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/01/political-donations.... In 2016, lobbyists contributed just $26 million of the $6,500 million spent in the elections. Lobbyist contributions account for a tiny portion of re-election campaigns, wholly at odds with the idea that money is what gives lobbyists influence.

I think what you're missing is that yes, Joe John working for Microsoft as a lobbyist is not directly donating, but Microsoft is donating to politicians via PACs etc. The notion that a politician is not going to give more weight to a lobbyist employed by their corporate donors is playing dense on purpose.

It's a semantics game.

PACs and SuperPACs are donations made for lobbying purposes. Individual lobbyists may not fork over money, but any real lobbying campaign overall does.

> Draft legislation in Washington is publicly available. Anyone (including privacy groups) could submit a redline markup.

Yes, but that requires that people know about the legislation and care enough to be involved, and it is unlikely that they'll be more willing than Microsoft will because it will affect them significantly less.

> The EU created a heavy handed data privacy law because it would be American companies that would feel most of the compliance burden.

It turns out that American companies are disproportionally affected because there are more large American companies, which means the law will target them more. That's like saying the U.S. should drop out of environmental agreements because they'll hurt our local industry more–it's not taking into account the fact that it's our own companies disproportionately causing the problem the legislation is trying to solve.

> “Privacy” sounds good in the abstract. It’s like “think of the children.”

"Think of the children" tends to lead to mass surveillance and a degradation of liberties, while calls for "privacy" lead to…Facebook earning less money? Where are you trying to take this argument?

Re: "Think of the children". If you consider the two questions after what you quoted to reply to, I think what was intended was to allude to a regulatory capture situation. The article specifically states certain carve-outs being suggested.

> Yes, but that requires that people know about the legislation and care enough to be involved, and it is unlikely that they'll be more willing than Microsoft will because it will affect them significantly less.

Aren’t those reasons to weigh the company’s views more heavily?

> It turns out that American companies are disproportionally affected because there are more large American companies, which means the law will target them more. That's like saying the U.S. should drop out of environmental agreements because they'll hurt our local industry more–it's not taking into account the fact that it's our own companies disproportionately causing the problem the legislation is trying to solve.

It certainly would be prudent for legislators to be more cautious about environmental legislation that could affect major domestic employers. The cost benefit (the potential gain from a cleaner environment versus the potential loss from reduced economic activity) is different for the US than for other countries.

> "Think of the children" tends to lead to mass surveillance and a degradation of liberties, while calls for "privacy" lead to…Facebook earning less money? Where are you trying to take this argument?

For both things, the benefits are widely appreciated while the costs necessarily are not. It’s entirely appropriate for companies to come in and say “hey, this law sounds great but is going to put additional burdens on companies that are out of proportion to the benefits.” Legislators must of course balance the resulting input, but the process of providing that input is not corruption.

As to Facebook making less money, that is a cost that must be considered. A huge fraction of the fancy coffee and avocado toast industry is bankrolled by Facebook money. If the benefits from increased privacy don’t outweigh the losses to companies like Facebook, the law is a bad one.

> Aren’t those reasons to weigh the company’s views more heavily?

No. Coming back to the environmental (which is decent metaphor, I think), a company which dumps into the local river is going to fight tooth and nail against any regulation that stops them from doing this because it might have a significant effect on their bottom line, while for most people this will not be enough for them to care to get involved because the harm is difficult to measure individually and hard to conceptualize (but, over the entire population, has significant detrimental effects). This shouldn’t mean that the government should weigh corporate concerns more heavily.

> The cost benefit (the potential gain from a cleaner environment versus the potential loss from reduced economic activity) is different for the US than for other countries.

Well, of course it is: it depends on which countries have business that rely on their negative externalities not catching up to them.

> Legislators must of course balance the resulting input

The problem is that the input legislators get is from a source that is strongly biased towards viewpoints that have a lot riding on the laws being put in place, which is generally not the people you want to be listening to for a fair, balanced opinion.

> If the benefits from increased privacy don’t outweigh the losses to companies like Facebook, the law is a bad one.

This is highly dependent on which group you are looking at. From Facebook’s perspective, most privacy laws are bad for them, while from their user’s perspective most privacy laws are probably good. The issue is that the latter group is being left out when this consideration is made, or at least is not well represented.

Let’s also remember that much of the general public (at least in the US) are MSFT shareholders, either directly or via index funds, probably as a result of retirement accounts. They aren’t mutually exclusive.

I honestly don't see the relevance of that. Most people who have such shares are not given any sort of say about what Microsoft does, so that they may have shares is not significant.

> That’s a perverted view of the “public interest” as being diametrically opposed to corporate interests.

The goal of corporations is to extract as much money as possible from the public. So in a very real sense, they are opponents, even if sometimes their interests align.

Corporations give people goods and services in exchange. (And almost everyone gets the money in the first place by working for a corporation.) Their interests are highly aligned.

> Their interests are highly aligned.

It sure doesn't seem like it to me. Corporations are about maximizing profits, which in part means soaking people to greatest degree possible.

It would be easier to support the notion that their interests are "highly aligned" if corporations had an incentive to make a reasonable profit rather than the most profit they can get away with.

Corporations make a profit by giving people what the people want. Apple makes tons of profits because it innovates and gives people products they love. Same thing for Walmart and Amazon. (It turns out that what people love is cheap crap delivered instantly, but that is what it is.) Same thing for Exxon. (People love cheap gas so they can drive their SUVs to Chipotle and Exxon delivers that.)

It’s entities that don’t have s profit motive that tend to be the least customer focused. If you rely on the New York or DC subway, it will become quite apparent that those organizations are focused on maximizing value for their respective labor unions rather than for their customers. Same thing for schools. (There is a reason people send their kids to private school even in places where the public schools are good.)

Microsoft makes a profit by charging for secret patents on Android, and by pushing the use of patented FAT and exFAT filesystems, instead of patent-free alternatives. Google makes a profit through pervasive spying. Pharmaceutical companies make huge profits by forbidding the import of medicine from abroad, even when it's the exact same medicine they sell. Or by selling HIV-tainted blood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...). Tobacco companies made billions by pervasive advertising to convince people smoking is cool. Banks profited by re-ordering payments so they could charge more overdrafts (https://medium.com/@harvestplatform/re-ordering-transactions...).

And all companies make a profit by paying their workers as little as they can, while charging as much as they can for their product.

There are ethical and unethical ways to turn a profit, and large companies tend to ignore the distinction. So it's difficult for me to imagine the degree of willful blindness required to say that the interests of people and corporations are mostly aligned, or that that is "what the people want".

> Corporations make a profit by giving people what the people want.

In part. In part, they make a profit by engaging in activities that nobody outside of corporations want, up to and including things that are harmful to society (and business) as a whole. The larger the corporation, it seems, the more of their profit comes from the latter.

In addition to selling goods, sometimes they also sell bads: https://www.thebalance.com/credit-default-swaps-pros-cons-cr...

I would be skeptical of any corporation writing public laws and even a certain A. Smith seems to agree[1]

[1] (right hand column) https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=rpMuAAAAYAAJ&hl=ja&pg=PA...

I don't know anything about the pros and cons of this bill. The fact remains that a corporation's interests are frequently not aligned with other people's and in the long run, the ability for corporation's to have this kind of relationship with legislators may do great harm to the Democratic process.

> That’s a perverted view of the “public interest” as being diametrically opposed to corporate interests.

It's hard to see that as perverted when it is so often true.

Mocrosoft’s views on legislation are already throughly represented through the voting power of its shareholders, employees, and anyone else who is affected by them. Are you saying they should have unequal influence beyond that?

The right to participate in a democracy isn’t limited to voting. The first amendment guarantees the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights contains a similar provision. If the government proposes to build a highway through my town, I can go meet with a legislator and express my disapproval. (And people do stuff like that all the time.) I’m not limited to just voting after the fact.

To the extent that a legislator might take account of Microsoft’s view more than that of a random citizen, it’s because Microsoft represents a really big and economically important group of citizens. At the end of the day, the number one mandate for any legislator is jobs. (“It’s the economy, stupid!”). Job losses are one of the few things over which Americans will vote incumbents out of office. Things that are bad for Microsoft are bad for the citizens of Washington. Microsoft not only has the right to make its views known (as a proxy for its shareholders, employees, and officers) but it’s entirely proper for Washington legislators to account for those views.

Legislators give Microsoft more weight just because of jobs? You don’t think campaign contributions play a part?

And are you implying that Microsoft represents its employees when you say it represents a large and economically important group of citizens? Because it definitely does not. It pays its employees. It represents its shareholders.

I don’t think campaign contributions play a significant part. In Washington state corporations are limited to donating $1,900 per candidate (and corporate donations are illegal at the federal level). So there just isn’t very much money in play. Bedsides that, I have some exposure to lobbying at the state level. (When I was at Northwestern, our legal clinic lobbies on environmental issues.) it was common knowledge that the legislators took what Excelon has to say very seriously. But if you look at the records, Excelon employees just don’t donate very much money. (And again, corporate donations are banned.) I don’t have state records, but it’s just a couple of million dollars nationwide at the federal level, including Excelon’s PAC. This is a company with $33 billion in revenue and 35,000 employees. It’s chump change compared the to influence they have. The influence is because Excelon employees tons of people in rural Illinois, where a disproportionate share of the voting power happens to be.

It’s well known that it’s cheap to buy legislators. The low amounts involved don’t make a convincing argument to me that it doesn’t have an effect. It’s also well known that legislators spend a shitload of their time soliciting donations. Surely all that time spent begging for money influences people’s thinking.

If I gave a legislator a dollar to add a paragraph to a bill, we’d both go to jail. It would be laughable to argue that it doesn’t count as a bribe because the amount was small. Yet if I do the same thing except I donate that dollar to the campaign, it’s totally cool and even a good thing because I’m a job creator?

My godfather was a 17 term congressman starting in the 70's, he always said for most issues there were lobbyists on both sides of the issue and if you voted how you wanted you'd get checks. When one side doesn't have money vote how you want and throw a fundraising party and invite the people you voted with.

  If you were hard up for money, you could just play at being undecided or persuadable and watch money roll in.  The biggest problem was it simply takes a lot of TIME to get money from lobbyists because they want to see your staff and sometimes you.

Much of his time in congress was pre-internet so there are two big changes 1. ability of people to see where you are getting money is a lot easier, creating a cost for teasing money out of say big oil companies. 2.Also this was before the flood of dark money, which puts pressure on needing to raise money.

> Things that are bad for Microsoft are bad for the citizens of Washington.

Corporate lobbyists like to say things like that, but it isn't always true.

Huh? As a subscriber to Office 365, Microsoft has sensitive information about me, and so I am affected by Microsoft's handling of privacy and data security.

How does that make my voting power representative of their views?

I also question whether a company's views are represented through the voting power of its employees.

Microsoft’s views can be represented by groups of people without every individual within every group representing them.

I’d still wager that you represent their views to an extent. You’d probably oppose a 100,000% tax on Office, or a plan to disband the company and destroy all of its assets, for example.

The employees want the company to prosper. Their views will be closer to what’s good for the company.

The shareholders will represent the company perfectly, pretty much by definition.

Perverted is strong. You might say that there are no specific guarantors of a democracy, and that "one person, one vote" can be interpreted in many ways. But considering regulatory capture by corporate interests undemocratic is a totally fair point, agreed-upon by leftists and free market evangelists alike. There is nothing inherently perverse about this claim.

> Lobbying is pure corruption

I never understood why more people don't see it this way. You literally pay money to get X bill passed. If that's not corruption I don't know what is.

Because no one wants to think that “their side” is corrupt. It’s always the other side.

I think much of Europe is looking at the US that way. It's mind blowing, especially how much it happens in the open. We have lots of corruption too, but it's mostly hidden and if it gets out it's a scandal. In the US it appears to be just normal matter of fact stuff. Company funds politician; politician gets elected; favourable law gets passed; nobody bats an eye.

Much of Europe must be very ignorant about American law then, because it is illegal here for companies to fund the election campaigns of candidates.

Are you arguing that Google NetPAC giving money to candidates' election campaigns is in some meaningful way not Google giving money to candidates? If so, what is that meaningful way?

(I realize that this is very different in a legal way, i.e., it would be illegal for money from Google to go to candidates without first being routed through employees' salaries and then to NetPAC, but because it is, it's quite legal and it's totally fine that donations from NetPAC are still decided by senior Google execs and the PAC represents itself to candidates as supporting Google's interests. I'm asking if this is different in a practical way.)

This is only kinda true. It's illegal for companies to fund the election campaigns of candidates above a certain dollar amount -- unless it's done the right way.

Our system appears quite corrupt when it comes to bribery. That there are so many legal ways to do it (and not call it bribery) only underscores that.

Because it’s not true. It’s a falsehood perpetuated by people who seek to delegitimize the status quo. You pay people to make PowerPoint presentations about the proposed legislation. (And create talking points and white papers and that sort of thing. A lot of it is just arming legislators with data and arguments to support positions they support anyway.)

In many cases you're paying people to create the text of the laws themselves.

Also, how is "paying people to make PowerPoint presentations and talking points about proposed legislation so that legislators can be convinced that a certain law should be passed" not just a form of "paying to pass a certain law"? When I set out to write complex software, I generally collect data, make arguments, write design docs / white papers, and occasionally make PowerPoint presentations about how the software should be designed and why; that's part of the process of meaningfully developing software just as much as banging out some code in a text editor is. I'm still a software developer, and when the company is paying me to make presentations and arguments in favor of getting software developed, they are absolutely paying me to develop software.

(Also, what's wrong with seeking to delegitimize the status quo? In other contexts, don't we call that "disruption"? It might be a falsehood, but we can debate the substance of a claim without attacking the motives of the people making a claim.)

The entire legislature still has to vote on the law though, and lobbyists are never meeting with all, or even more than a few, specific representatives. I would say a much bigger problem is the towing of the party line - whatever senior members propose, junior members vote for, else they risk being ousted from their party.

Also, I have always found the blaming of lobbyists odd: I am confused by the blaming of lobbyists for presenting their agenda to a legislator, who then promotes that agenda, leading to the passing of a law that is pro-that-agenda. I would place all the blame on the legislators. It’s like, if I approach my boss and ask for excessive raises over and over, and wine and dine her, and then I keep getting those raises, should my co-workers be far more mad at me or my boss? It seems to me it is my boss’s fault for giving the raise, as she holds all the real power, not my fault for asking. She has the duty to decline if the request is improper. I do not believe I have a duty to not make my case, despite probably being scummy. What I am doing may be frowned upon, but if my boss is swayed by a few compliments and a donation to her charity of choice, she probably should not be the boss. The same goes for legislators - stop voting for the dummies with no scruples, and stop thinking it is the fault of anyone other than the people who actually vote for these hypothetical bills that result in so many one-sided, pro one-company-or-religion-or-whateveror, awful laws.

I personally feel lobbyists are scummy, but I fail to see them as blameworthy in regards to the laws we actually end up with.

> I have always found the blaming of lobbyists odd

I think most people consider lobbying a serious problem because of the power discrepancy involved. You and I can't effectively lobby. The entities that can tend to be the ones who are already inordinately powerful. The result is that lobbying overall tends to disenfranchise ordinary citizens. It is inherently corrosive to our system of government.

>No individual citizens or even organizations

Isn't that exactly what a lobbyist is??

Microsoft could have thrown their lot in with Apple, but I guess they're going to look more like the ad-tech giants than Apple and need to preserve the status quo.

Apple should assemble a separate coalition of businesses that would lean just as hard as the ad-tech coalition in favor of privacy in all these state legislatures. I'm pretty sure most enterprise SaaS companies that charge money for their product would have similar interests.

The text and history of the bill is available here [0]. It does not appear to have made much progress in the House, so they may run out of time to pass it at all.

[0]: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5376&Year=2019

Did Jay Inslee invite these people? I'm not clear on that point.

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