Medical marijuana lobbyists have an easy, obvious answer: impediments are the result of a failed and ill-considered war on drugs that's actively causing lots and lots of harm. It's easy to see yourself as virtuous in that scenario.
Anti-privacy lobbyists have to go through more difficult mental contortions: large movements of people are concerned about the privacy invasions our devices represent, and that puts our future profits at risk. People are very capable of being irrational when their paycheck depends on it, but that feels too far to me.
It's better to ban it since it's mostly evil.
But "growth as in growing marijuana" is qualitatively different than "growth as in self-replicating paperclips that grow until they destroy the entire earth." :)
I kid, but in reality I don't think the medical marijuana proponents are even after "growth" in the sense Amazon used it-- i.e., to capitalize on any opportunities to gain a stronghold in any relevant markets where medical marijuana could conceivably be used to the advantage of the medical marijuana lobby. They just want medical marijuana to be available at all for the obvious cases where it eases suffering. And at least every proponent I've talked to wants there to be sane safeguards/regulations in place and studies to make sure the benefits outweigh the costs.
In fact, even the recreational marijuana lobby decided to vote against and defeat a prop in some state where a tiny group of "growth-as-in-paperclips" hopefuls were attempting to monopolize marijuana growth/distribution. (Ohio maybe?)
Anyway, medical marijuana lobby seems to have made growth-as-in-business subsidiary to a second level of reflection, whereas in GP's Amazon quote the implication is that all other concerns are subsidiary to growth-as-in-business.
See the difference? One is protection for an industry, the other is a protection for a specific company.
If you think Alexa should be regulated, you can think it's immoral. But I have no problem with Amazon identifying why they care. Unless you think that the lobbyists read that as "make sure there is an Alexa named exemption".
The courts certainly do care about phrasing. You are taught to not say "we will destroy the opposition" at big companies so that they can avoid lawsuits, instead you say things along the lines of "we will provide the best user experience". Ultimately it is basically the same thing, but the second is safe in courts, the first will create a problem.
Edit: Case example: Google said AMP was to "provide the best user experience". But it also helps Google "destroy the opposition". So why isn't there a court case over Google abusing their position? Because they didn't say the second part here, just repeated the first. Words do matter a lot.
That is, no one believes that Google's AMP push was primarily about the best user experience. Just proving it in a court of law. What they call it is irrelevant to the moral question. Similarly, everyone knows that Amazon's lobbying is about protecting Alexa. I just don't think that's immoral.
It's strange that you would call it a moral or ethical difference. Legally different, maybe (in other cases, this is obviously legal).
This is reductive. When the Congress was writing cryptocurrency reporting rules, the crypto industry asking for clarifying amendments (to avoid classifying miners as exchanges) wasn't suppressing anyone's voice. It was supplementing it with specialist knowledge.
Privacy is a fundamental thing that's more important (and harder!) to protect than most things.
It's probably also a good idea to get a breadth of stakeholder's opinions on an issue. Lobbyists definitely have a massively outsized portion of this breadth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lobbying_in_the_Uni...
Being conquered by a foreign power?
How does that relate?
Why would we do that, considering the evidence available to us?
The comment author here is voicing the inner monologue of one of these people, not one of the other 99.999+% of people.