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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

After SOPA, it became clear that the U.S. info sector could no longer neglect its lobbying efforts in Washington. The MPAA and RIAA represent comparatively tiny (in terms of revenue) interests but were only thwarted by the unpredictable (and unreliable) intervention of the public.

Now this.

The info sector has become big industry and is going to play a correspondingly big role in U.S. politics going forward. They're going to make more campaign contributions, be more involved in the campaigns themselves, and spend more money on lobbyists than ever before. Capitol hill is about to get a whif of silver-dollar grapeshot from a new angle, and those voting to maintain NSA funding are in an exposed position!

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Just pointing this out, Telecom is part of the info sector and they've been lobbying forever.

I would say that google, Facebook, Microsoft and apple (prop 8) all lobby in some form. I mean Marissa Mayer had Obama over for dinner during the height of the campaign (she was hosting a fundraiser with her husband).

My point is this: we don't need more lobbyists so much as we need leadership. Zuck tried and has likely failed. In recent years I've started to think Ron Conway might be an interesting candidate to consider; he certainly holds enough sway in the valley.

Food for thought.

Be careful what you wish for, Google is now one of the biggest spenders in Washington [1], $18.2 million on lobbying in 2012. Needless to say, big business in the tech sector will have plenty of say in the future (if that was ever a worry), but, as always, civil liberties will continually need to be fought for.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/4/4394234/google-eight-bigges...

And what does Google lobby for? Amongst other things, getting the EU to relax it's privacy protections.

Yeah, those are really the guys I want on my side when it comes to fighting for civil liberties...

I wonder what would happen if EU privacy protections was relaxed such that Google's infamously controversial new privacy policies was allowed.

The depressing thing here is that it is going to a wrong direction. Instead of working to reduce the intervention of the politicians in the private affairs, what would inevitably happen is more money spent on lobbying, more laws bought by these money and more politicians and and government functionaries having their services to offer for sale. Instead of government getting smaller, the government will get bigger - and this would be paid by exactly the businesses who suffered from the expansion of the government. They just will pay so the other guys would suffer instead of them, now that they have enough money to play the game.

We need a well-organized lobbying effort to support the interests of United States internet companies. Those survey numbers are actually astounding.

The most surprising thing about lobbying and donation efforts is that they aren't really all that expensive. All it takes is a few hundred thousand to a million to swing a tight election. The amounts aren't that large. Maybe a crowdfunding campaign for a Free Internet PAC?

From my perspective outside the States, there is already government support, which is the full-court press US ambassadorial staff have been running in Australia and New Zealand to categorise privacy and data sovereignty laws as unfair and illegitimate anti-competition laws whose sole purpose is to prevent companies like Amazon gutting the local IT markets.

I imagine they are running the same line in Europe.

I wonder what Amazon's relationship with the US government is like?

Sure, there are some interests that run in the opposite direction.

But domestically, the amount of power Silicon Valley and tech centers across the country hold in Washington is not commensurate with their economic and cultural clout. Certainly it is time for that to change.

> We need a well-organized lobbying effort to support the interests of United States internet companies.

Was launched after SOPA: http://internetassociation.org

They're just starting to get serious, but the Internet Association is playing way too much softball, and more importantly they're pushing more for the specific corporate goals of their financiers than the interests of the internet at large.

Do you have any specific examples? I haven't been keeping up (I know, I know, I should be.)

You're forgetting that the same industry is already getting the US government to lean on non-US governments to relax their privacy laws so that the US info sector can perpetrate it's own massive privacy violations thing for fun and profit.

As far as non-US citizens and their privacy is concerned, the US tech industry and the NSA are just two sides of the same coin.

Is the EFF really strapped for cash? If their budget was 2 or 3 times bigger, would they really be able to do a lot more?

Unlikely. And I believe that the issue is that some politicians still have an old school boy mentality where nerds/geeks are somehow lesser than them.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) famously said "Bring in the Nerds" during SOPA hearings. He then continued to call people in technology nerds multiple times. Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrrj9Wc2L84

Rep. Mel Watts (D-NC) made it a point in his opening statement during the SOPA hearings to mention that he "is not a nerd" and therefore doesn't understand the technological parts of the bill. Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6x1sYYqKLY

Until congress starts to realize that nerds are not basement dwellers, and instead are pop culture (Facebook, The Internship) they will continue to roll their eyes at any sort of lobbying.

Until congress starts to realize that nerds are not basement dwellers, and instead are pop culture (Facebook, The Internship) they will continue to roll their eyes at any sort of lobbying.

Good. That creates an opportunity for more enlightened people to challenge the incumbents, backed by the ample funding that the nerds are going to be throwing around increasingly in order to protect their industry from the incompetents.

A saying that begins "First they ignore you" comes to mind.

That seems like wishful thinking. Nerds don't run for office. They're not interested and mostly busy doing other stuff. Spending Valley lobby dollars might buy our industry a timeshare in a politician, but "our" rep won't have any more respect for nerds than anybody else in Washington.

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