I wonder if the lesson they will take from this is that, rather than reform, they should invest more in lobbying. Considering how much money and influence on the public opinion they have, that's a rather scary thought.
Absolutely not. You do the opposite of that. You go at layer zero. At the population level and enter the culture wars arena with the goal of winning.
Some of these companies are structured in a way that the founders are poised to retain control of their companies till they retire (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Berkshire).
If you are Zuck or Brin or Dorsey and you want to do this until you are 95 like Buffett then you are better off barking and biting back, acquire a reputation of a fighter so that people like Sanders and Warren would leave you alone. There will be consequences such as employees criticizing and leaving but in the long term you are better off fighting.
When a politician comes after you and your company, you just attack back, if you are not prepared to do this you should simply not start a proper company and opt for a carrer in a hedge fund instead, where you can make money in the dark.
Founders and CEOs should not be the first offender but when they are called out they should absolutely attack back.
Sanders is pouring manure all over corporate America since 2015 and all he had to endure was Michael Bloomberg attacking him back for half a debate, and wouldn't have happened if Bloomberg didn't decide to run.
If a guy like Bezos or Zuck were to tweet back at Sanders something to the tune "I've started a company in a garage and now it has the same credit rating of the US Government, what have you done with your life?"
That would be fair game, politicians prey on weakness, they smell it and keep biting till you lay there unconscious
Can you please expand on this? What exactly are you trying to say here?
Big Tech should be locating large employment centers in strategic locations around the country. And by strategic I don’t mean where the talent, resources, or customers are located but rather where influential Congresspeople, Senators, and Governors are located. Then wield your soft power with these folks, e.g. “You can break us up but it’s just going to cost your district/state massive job losses”.
Next, meet with other agitating politicians to find out their underlying motivations and help them to achieve those things - doesn’t even need to be real, just help make them look good for their next re-election campaign. So Bezos should work out a public deal with Bernie and AOC to raise Amazon’s minimum wage to $20 an hour. Bernie and AOC will look like progressive heroes but would be effectively defanged in continuing to attack Amazon (to a large degree).
Big Tech should be locating large employment centers in strategic locations around the country. And by strategic I don’t mean where the talent, resources, or customers are located but rather where influential Congresspeople, Senators, and Governors are located.
If these companies start doing this they could lose to more efficient competition. Hope they aren't that stupid.
Aside from whether or not this is good to do, do you remember the Amazon News incident? Amazon tried to "fight back" on Twitter and it just made them look bad.
(Maybe incident is too strong a term, but I don't know what else to call it. Tweets such as this: https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359)
The graph showed a huge spike in lobbying money after antitrust. Of course, this makes perfect sense in terms of incentives on both sides. Perhaps this [2] was the graph.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/images/micro1...
If you're building mines or manufacturing plants that take years to build and then another year to get running right and then another five to be profitable and your margins are thin you have a much larger interest in ensuring regulations don't change or at least not fast because a few percent change in profit could mean you never recoup your investment over the lifetime of the facility.
It can still take years to build stuff but rarely is it 3+yr and tech margins are fatter and once you have something your can scale up and down much more rapidly.
I think the "natural" amount of lobbying is going to be lower in tech than for industries that do physical things because tech has some things that make working with regulatory uncertainty less terrible.
Amazon's warehouse network is their most valuable political commodity. They are often the highest paying entry level jobs wherever they are put, represent a huge local bump in payroll and property taxes, and they are being placed in voting districts all around the country.
The left because of anti-trust and anti-ultra-rich sentiment, and the right because of perceptions of social media censorship.
If they were acting properly in their own cronyistic self-interest, they would've cozied up to the right. But the demographics of their employees precluded that.