Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

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Here's another one:

"In 2012, Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, D.C., lobbyists—a list typically stalked exclusively by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petro-carbon leviathans. Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed’s $15.3 million. Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997, also came below Google, at $15.6 million spent, as did Northrop Grumman at $17.5 million."

If you follow the supplied link to the lobbyist spending database, you find that the fiendish "National Association of Realtors" spent way more than Google and LockMart put together. The nefarious "American Hospital Association" also outspent Google.

Are we to assume that they are even more cryptomilitaryindistrial than Google?

No. I'd assume they have legislation in front of Congress. Far simpler.

There is a critique of centralization of information within internet corporations and government agencies, but this isn't it.

From a business perspective, you want to look at these as rates against revenue, not just bulk sums for reasons you pointed out.

Normalized for dollar spend per $1000 in revenue (2012), the % spend on lobbying is:

HP 232%

Facebook 75.6%

Northrop G 69.4%

Yahoo 55.1%

Google 36.3%

Lockheed Martin 32.4%

Boeing 19.1%

Oracle 18.1%

Microsoft 10.9%

IBM 4.6%

Ideally you would want to normalize by revenue from government contracts (like in HP's case), but there isn't really a story to follow here because different companies spend different percentages of their revenue on lobbying.

> Ideally you would want to normalize by revenue from government contracts

I'm not sure that makes sense; normalizing by revenue tells the tale of how much of what the company brings in is devoted to swaying public policy, but I'm not sure what normalizing by revenue from government contracts get you -- presumably, any profit maximizing corporation trying to sway policy is trying to do so for its own benefit, whether the way in which it hopes to receive that benefit is by direct government contracts, or by government policy encouraging (and perhaps even subsidizing) others to purchase the service it sells, or by some other shift in policy that helps the firms business.

It makes sense because some companies see lobbying as an investment in future sales, either indirectly through policy or directly.

HP is a prime example of this, as many government computers and services involve HP, hence HP has such a high "investment" rate with lobbying.

The National Association of Realtors is evil in the ways it maintains its monopoly on home sale transactions. Its enormous amount of lobbying is all about guaranteeing that monopoly by buying lawmaker votes.

> Are we to assume that they are even more cryptomilitaryindistrial than Google?

No. But those others haven't managed to convince too many that hey are "not Evil" or some like that bullshit.

Once they made that proclamation they get a nice PR boost, but when they are perceived to not abide by it, they should accept the corresponding criticism.

> But those others haven't managed to convince too many that hey are "not Evil" or some like that bullshit.

The "American Hospital Association" probably has very few people who think it is evil.

I guess you haven't read the HN threads on hospital costs in the US. Here's a sample https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6838269

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