Google based lobbying actions in the European Union are no less intense: 249 meetings! Its amazing how much time EU officials seem to have.
https://www.integritywatch.eu/organizations
From their results looks like Google is not getting back their money worth...
> 249 meetings!
The parliament alone has more then 700 members, idk. if 249 for one of the largest tech companies is really that bad. The problem are less the number of meetings but a lot of other things around it.
This represents a meeting every week, for 5 years in a row. There are 27 EU countries, and approximately 25 million active enterprises in the EU. Not all these companies are of the same size but for large companies you have more than 25,000. That is a large footprint. Are these EU officers able to cope with all that and still provide so much attention to a few companies ?
"Lobbyists and Bureaucrats in Brussels: Capitalism’s Brokers"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326878033_Lobbyists...
"...With over 30,000 lobbyists in town, Brussels is often called the European capital of lobbying. Despite this, little is known on how this political system works in practice. This book offers an unprecedented window into the everyday relationships between bureaucrats and interest representatives. Where the media only shows lobbyists as they meet MEPs and submit amendments, the book argues that the bulk of their work is done in close contact with EU bureaucrats - a form of 'quiet politics' developed by the business community, targeting officials with little public exposure..."
I mean, the US has a ton of industry funded "think tanks" that are effectively unregistered lobbyists. If they spend >50% of their time lobbying, they have to register. Some probably cross that line and don't register.
Spending money on lobbying makes a lot of noise, but donating to a "think tank" can be stealthy.
It could be interesting to scrape / crowd-source the public calendars of house/senate committee members and agency commissioners to identify these orgs and the scale of their lobbying activities. The results might surprise you.
Politicians need a media strategy in order to do the things that they're paid to do by private interests, and think tanks provide that strategy.