A brand new report from client advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen says that huge tech firms are now the largest lobbyists, and that the cash they spend on influencing authorities coverage has allowed them “to harm consumers, workers, and other businesses alike.”
However, whereas Apple is talked about 27 instances within the report, just one direct criticism is leveled on the firm …
The report is entitled Big Tech, Big Cash: Washington’s New Power Players. It opens by lumping collectively Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
In latest years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have all come below elevated scrutiny for threatening our privateness, democracy, small companies, and staff. In the race to amass monopoly energy of their respective markets, these companies have developed predatory enterprise practices that harvest consumer information for revenue, and facilitated discrimination by race, faith, nationwide origin, age, and gender […]
Big Tech has eclipsed yesterday’s huge lobbying spenders, Big Oil and Big Tobacco. In 2020, Amazon and Facebook spent almost twice as a lot as Exxon and Philip Morris on lobbying.
During the 2020 election cycle, Big Tech spent $124 million in lobbying and marketing campaign contributions –– breaking its personal information from previous election cycles […]
This report finds that the 4 firms have massively expanded their Washington affect machines –– eclipsing huge spenders of yesterday like Big Oil and Tobacco, and making them among the many strongest company pursuits in Washington. It particulars their marketing campaign and lobbying spending whereas offering an outline of their different efforts to affect coverage making by way of promoting, help of researchers, and different means.
This sample is repeated all through the report, with Apple principally named together with different firms, reasonably than having any particular fees leveled in opposition to it. Indeed, whereas referencing the “big four,” the report acknowledges that the majority of the spending has been by Facebook and Amazon.
It additionally notes that Apple is the one one of many 4 tech giants not to have a political motion committee (PAC).
The charts do present that Apple has roughly doubled the variety of lobbyists it makes use of over the previous decade, however they’ve only one particular criticism of the Cupertino firm.
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google additionally sponsor particular person lecturers, who typically fail to appropriately disclose conflicts of curiosity on account of this funding. As one instance, Fiona Scott Morton, a Yale University economist who has revealed a number of influential articles on the antitrust instances in opposition to Facebook and Google, was present in 2020 to have acquired funds from Amazon and Apple –– but didn’t disclose them till they was uncovered by reporters.
That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t foyer exhausting for its personal pursuits, in fact. We have seen multiple examples of the company doing that, together with on some controversial topics – the newest one reported just yesterday.
At the identical time, Apple does typically appear to get inappropriately listed alongside tech giants with very completely different enterprise fashions, particularly in regard to privateness points. It’s not clear to me that there’s a lot justification for together with it so prominently on this report.
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