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Comment by BlarfMcFlarf | Hacker News Reader

Because while corruption* is still rampant in the EU, it’s not at least directly protected by the constitution like in the USA, so occasionally some legislation that benefits normal folks over megacorporations manages to sneak through.

*also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.

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... sigh.

Lobbying isn't equivalent to corruption.

While the two can get very similar in the US because US elections have no campaign spending cap, therefore politicians (and even some civil servants) have a constant need for massive political donations, in general lobbying is a lot more complex than "spend money, get law you like". It usually involves a high amount of, you guessed it, waiting around in lobbies.

In the EU, the stereotypical industry lobbyist is a guy who will invite some commission members to a very fancy restaurant and tell them "About this regulation you're passing, we've prepared a full binder on it, with different policy options you could consider, case studies illustrating the trade-offs of each option, ideas for further research, etc".

Bureaucrats know that the content of the binder will be biased towards the interests of the companies that funded it, but they still read it because it's full of industry information and technical knowledge they don't have.

There's allegedly a bit of give and take, where they expect the info to be biased, but not too obviously biased otherwise they stop returning your calls.

Good bureaucrats will then cross-reference that info with info from competing interest groups, researchers, wikipedia, etc, and hope that they end up with a balanced view of the industry. Bad bureaucrats will just copy the biggest group's proposed laws verbatim.

But in any case, calling it "rampant corruption" is just ignorant. There's a lot of thought put into that process beyond "do what the corporations want".

Your post didn’t require the impolite sigh and reads much better without it.

That's fair, I could have worded my annoyance better (or skipped it altogether).

Too late to edit.

> Because while corruption* is still rampant in the EU

> *also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.

Firstly, corruption is not "rampant" in the European Union, it is on average the least corrupt political organization on this planet: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022

Secondly, lobbying is not corruption, it is legalized, registered and regulated in most EU members and at the Union's level even more so.

If interest groups cannot communicate their interests to politicians, how do you expect politicians to inform their votes, make laws, and take decisions? Should they just guess or know everything about every topic they are solicited about? Should they "Google" the answers (the irony here should strike you in regards to the original post)?

IMO it's quite simple - lobbying works best at home. Most governments serve the interests of local industries more than they should, and Silicon Valley is quite obviously not in the EU. Apart from not employing many people and not paying a lot of taxes(!), some of SV companies' values are a little alien to Europeans.

Influencing a not completely corrupted government is not as simple as money in - laws out. That would work equally well everywhere.

And additionally, the large tech corporations are not from to EU and they contribute very little to the EU relative to their size with their tax reduction schemes as well.

The tech companies don't have much bargaining power in the EU because of that.

This always surprises me. While as an Indian I'm ashamed of the level of corruption we have in every government system of ours, at least it's still called corruption (and is illegal) what US calls lobbying (and is legal).

Sadly, electoral bonds make this less true. All the benefits of lobbying for businesses with none of the transparency that political donations have in the US.

I don’t think any sane reading of the constitution makes lobbying protected. It is the current judicial interpretation, but that could certainly change in the future (more so than many other aspects of the constitution IMO).

In the EU, really? I can see it in the US, but the amount of lobbying spend in EU must be 1-2 orders of magnitude less.

Also, all highly advanced democracies have some lobbying. It is not viewed widely by political scientists as corruption.

If you spend time in brussels it becomes quite difficult to avoid lobbyists. They are perfectly nice people but apparently everywhere, for every sector and very much full time there.

It's not about "benefits normal folks" at all, but about keeping foreign competition at arms length while fostering EU companies.

That must be why I have one-click filed my taxes on my phone for the last 15 years while TurboTax et.al. prevents the same thing in the US. Foreign competition.

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