Communication Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The Tech Lobby: Tracing the Contours of New

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Media Elite Lobbying Power
Pawel Popiel
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA
19104, USA

This article traces the contours of media elite power via tech industry lobbying of the
U.S. government. Tech companies wield considerable influence over digital commu-
nications, and the success of their lobbies in accomplishing policy goals reflects their
ability to maintain and expand that power. The analysis reveals the depth and per-
vasiveness of their political influence; a proxy for media elite power. Exploring the
ideological framing of the issues on which these companies lobby offers insights into
how this power operates, subsuming the public interest under corporate priorities.
Finally, analyzing tensions between state and lobby interests reveals both the impli-
cations of their political activity and the contours of lobbying as an instrument of
media elite power.

Keywords: Political Economy, Tech Sector, Media Elites, Discursive Capture, Privacy,
Surveillance, Public Interest.

doi:10.1093/ccc/tcy027

Introduction
The normative belief that communication and media systems should facilitate
democratic discourse and participation animates research in the political economy
of communication (Hardy, 2014). Since regulation impacts the capacity of the
media system to support these goals, policymaking occupies a key focus in such
scholarship. Given the field’s structural approach to media and telecommunica-
tions, scholars often draw attention to the roles of media elites and their commer-
cial imperatives and neoliberal ideology that influence media policy (McChesney,
2013). Yet media lobbying, namely corporate influence on legislative and regula-
tory processes, remains understudied and undertheorized. Although the subject
receives frequent mention in media policy analyses, it serves as evidence of corpo-
rate power rather than a phenomenon worthy of closer examination. Such accounts

Corresponding author: Pawel Popiel; e-mail: ppopiel@asc.upenn.edu

566 Communication Culture & Critique 11 (2018) 566–585 © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on
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P. Popiel The Tech Lobby

tend to privilege overt corporate influence, via market and monopoly power, over
the indirect influence and soft power of lobbying.
However, lobbying represents a key component of the relationship between cor-

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porations and the neoliberal state, on which media elites rely to push their agenda.
Consequently, it has significant implications for the formulation of media laws and
policies, increasing the sector’s power and “tip[ping] the scale in favor of industry-
friendly legislation” (Calabrese & Mihal, 2011, p. 240). Policy victories coupled with
the size and entrenched market power of major media companies decrease organi-
zational obstacles to effective lobbying (Baker, 2007). This can profoundly impact
the media landscape, as corporate actors push for laws and regulations that under-
mine consumer choice, increase industry concentration, and threaten user privacy.
Lobbying represents a rare, visible instance of the interlocking relations between
media elites and the state. Examining such intersections, as Freedman (2015)
argues, remains “a central task of political economy approaches and a key objective
in confronting the abuse of media power” (p. 7). This study focuses on the immense
efforts of new media elites, namely large tech companies, to lobby the U.S. govern-
ment on a wide array of issues, with a focus on antitrust, privacy, and surveillance
regulation. It takes a macro view of the industry to provide an account of its signifi-
cant lobbying power, its political and economic priorities, and the ideology that
underlies them. Foregrounding the tech lobby reveals the depth and pervasiveness
of its political influence. It also draws attention to the mechanisms by which the
public interest becomes subsumed under corporate priorities. Finally, it highlights
occasional tensions with the state, revealing the contours of media elite power.

Neoliberal politics and the media lobby

Lobbying involves pressuring public officials to support laws and policies that bene-
fit lobbyists’ clients (Calabrese & Mihal, 2011). Compared to other developed coun-
tries, the United States remains an exception with respect to the permissive laws
overseeing the practice, which has antecedents as early as 1789, when New York
merchants attended the U.S. Congress’s first session to delay its passage of new tar-
iffs (Kaiser, 2009, p. 82; Kibler & Kibler, 2016). However, lobbying was not always
prevalent, viewed by courts as a form of corruption of the public interest (Teachout,
2014), and its growth reflects larger changes in the U.S. political economy.
Increasing First Amendment protections of corporations, the heavy regulatory cli-
mate of the 1960s, and the deregulatory sweep of the Reagan Era all contributed to
making corporate lobbying a mainstay of politics (Drutman, 2015; Teachout, 2014).
Its expansion overlaps with the ascendance of neoliberalism, which champions
the market as a key purveyor of economic growth; favors deregulatory policies, rele-
gating the role of the state to enabling that growth; and prioritizes elite governance
and elite interests, like individual (property) rights, over those of the majority
(Brown, 2015; Harvey, 2005). By economizing the political realm and expelling the
notion of the “public good” from its political logic, neoliberalism blurs the boundary

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between state and corporate power (Brown, 2015; Harvey, 2005). Understood in
this context, lobbying represents the increasing slippages between the state and the
market it oversees. As the government reflects the will of corporations, it does so at

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the expense of the will of the public (Lessig, 2011).
The U.S. media system, itself a product of deregulatory policies and corporate
influence (Crawford, 2013; Pickard, 2015), reflects these processes in the form of an
ideological alignment between the state and media corporations. Such “corporate
libertarianism” (Pickard, 2015, p. 5) reflects neoliberalism’s political vision of corpo-
rate freedoms bolstered by an unregulated market, with a state limited to safeguard-
ing them. The system facilitates the expansion and consolidation of media
corporate power, often with deleterious effects for the public interest and, more
broadly, democracy (McChesney, 2013; Pickard, 2015).
Scrutinizing this system’s contours often involves investigations into the political
consequences of industry concentration and the overt exercise of market power to
drown out competition, and influence pricing, media content, and policy (e.g.,
Baker, 2007; Crawford, 2013; McChesney, 2013). These behaviors, incentivized by
state-enabled structural forces governing the media system, tend towards market
failure, including the underproduction of public goods such as journalism (Pickard,
2015), and the failure to deploy broadband to harder-to-reach and less profitable
areas (Crawford, 2011).
However, media corporations also play an active role in influencing the state to
secure their interests, injecting their voice into policymaking processes. Examining
this influence often involves highlighting the critical role of media elites, whose pri-
orities direct the activities of the companies over which they preside. As Freedman
(2014) argues, “Media power is not reducible to the properties of elites alone but
neither is it separate from the worlds they inhabit, the structures they preside over
and the objectives they pursue” (p. 59). Of particular concern is the proximity of
media elites to the state and their “‘interlocking’ nature” (Freedman, 2015, p. 7),
namely the often-private intermingling between politicians and media executives,
lobbyists, and others, where corporate and state actors eke out an ideologically-
inflected common ground. This is compounded by the practice of “the revolving
door,” through which regulators pass as they leave their government jobs at the end
of their tenure for positions in the industry they oversaw (Pickard, 2015). The
revolving door represents another instance of the slippage between the public and
private realms (Calabrese & Mihal, 2011), and facilitates the fluidity between elite
and state interests (Freedman, 2014).
Critically examining the imprint of this fluidity often entails analyzing the dis-
cursive, ideological dimensions of media policy, with an emphasis on how those
dimensions cement existing power relations within the media system (e.g.,
Freedman, 2014; Pickard, 2013). This draws attention to subtler dimensions of cor-
porate influence on the policymaking process, more visible in policy discourses than
immediate policy outcomes. Kwak (2013) calls this “cultural capture,” which
denotes the corporate influence on regulators’ systems of belief, policy preferences,

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P. Popiel The Tech Lobby

and ideological biases of which they may not be entirely conscious, yet which arise
because of their proximity to the industry itself (see also Teachout & Khan, 2014,
pp. 45–46). Pickard (2015) uses a more precise term, “discursive capture” (p. 218),

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namely a discursive narrowing of the range of policy options considered by regula-
tors overseeing the media industry by writing off alternatives like providing subsi-
dies for public media and breaking up industry oligopolies. This capture occurs at
the ideological level, naturalizing elite values within the state (Freedman, 2014;
Pickard, 2015). As Freedman (2014) argues, such ideological narrowing “marginal-
ize[s] broader theories of the public interest, citizenship and, in particular, democ-
racy” (p. 83). While discursive capture may not immediately produce industry-
friendly regulator votes or decisions, over time it contributes to “policy failure” in
addressing structural problems of the media system (Pickard, 2015).
Lobbying plays a critical role in these processes, both as a conduit for elite inter-
ests into the state and by embedding the revolving door in its business model
(Teachout, 2014). Media industries have long relied on lobbying to exert policy
influence: for instance, in the 1930s the powerful radio lobby contributed to the
commercialization of the medium (McChesney, 1995). Given political economy’s
focus on structural forces and media power, lobbying receives frequent mention in
media policy literature, often framed as a corporate instrument for achieving desired
policy outcomes. For instance, Crawford (2013) documents the outsized role of
Comcast’s massive lobby in securing its successful merger with NBC Universal.
Such accounts often treat the power of lobbies as a proxy for the power of their
clients, however few examine media lobbying directly. For example, McGuigan and
Pickard (2017) examine Comcast’s massive lobby, including the number of lobbyists
it employs, its expenditures on political causes and campaigns, and the policy issues
it supports, all reflecting its goal of limited telecom regulation. Stressing the political
ties of the company’s top lobbyists, their portrait captures the close relationship
between the cable giant and D.C. power circles, and its heavy investment in influ-
encing the political process. Looking at another media industry, Proffitt and Susca
(2015) trace the video game industry’s lobby and its efforts to influence the judicial
system to limit requirements on disclosing video games’ violent content to the pub-
lic to increase sales. This work conceptualizes lobbying as an instrument of corpo-
rate media’s political power for profit accumulation, often at the expense of public
interest laws and policies.
However, these accounts often elide occasional tensions and conflicts between
corporate interests and the state, the attendant limits of lobbying influence, and
its complex impact on public interest policymaking. Moreover, they often miss
the range of media elite policy interests that extend beyond explicitly media-
related policy, and thus the pervasiveness of corporate media power in politics.
This is particularly true for growing tech giants, whose innovations in digital
technologies expand to other fields, such as “biotechnology, financial services and
weapons systems [which are] increasingly wrapped up with media transforma-
tions” (Freedman, 2014, p. 43).

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Tech giants
If lobbying receives little direct attention from political economy scholars, the lob-
bies of tech giants like Facebook and Google receive even less. However, as

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Freedman (2014) observes, digital capitalism replicates rather than disrupts ana-
logue capitalism. Indeed, tech giants have acquired near-monopoly status in their
respective markets globally: Amazon takes in half of all online purchases, Facebook
captures 77% of mobile social traffic, Google owns 81% of the search engine market
and 97% of mobile search, and Facebook and Google rake in 63% of the digital ad
market (eMarketer, 2017; Hendrickson & Galston, 2017).
Many of the problems associated with corporate power in the telecommunica-
tions industry extend to the tech sector. Indeed, as McChesney (2013) demon-
strates, tech firms seek to maintain their monopoly status by harnessing network
effects, exerting control over technical standards, and lobbying for strong patent
protections. These and other strategies undermine competition in the sector that
would otherwise curb some of the excesses of their market power, including
threats to user privacy and the commercialization of the Internet. The government
often overlooks such problems, partly due to its reliance on these firms’ rich user
data for its surveillance-related activities in the name of national security
(McChesney, 2013, pp. 158–171).
Since these companies’ business operations and priorities exert influence on the
ongoing growth and development of digital media, their lobbying efforts deserve
attention. As McChesney (2013) notes, tech giants like Facebook and Google “have
a long way to go to catch up with the ISPs [Internet Service Providers] or the media
giants on the lobbying front, but they are starting to close the gap” (p. 144). He
identifies two lobbies that exert a considerable commercial influence on the
Internet, while cementing new media’s economic power. The first is the copyright
lobby, which promotes strong copyright protections on the Internet to create artifi-
cial scarcity online to control and extract value from online content. The second
sets its sights on defeating legislative efforts to repatriate taxes from these firms’
foreign operations to maximize profits (McChesney, 2013).
Since such firms wield considerable power over digital communications, their
degree of success in accomplishing these goals reflects their ability to maintain
and expand that power. This, in turn, carries significant implications for the
increasing commercialization of the Internet, and user, activist, and regulator abil-
ity to contest and oppose their influence on a host of policy areas, like online pri-
vacy. Consequently, examining where these companies direct their lobbying
efforts can shed light not just on their business priorities, but also the extent of
their political involvement; a proxy for media elite power. Drawing attention to
instances of tension between state and lobby interests can offer some preliminary
insights into the contours of lobbying as an instrument new media power.
Finally, exploring the ideological framing of the issues on which these compa-
nies lobby can offer insights into how this power operates. Indeed, the tech sector

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P. Popiel The Tech Lobby

represents an insightful case study of media elite power because its power is
largely naturalized, if not masked by a techno-cultural ethos that has roots in the
counterculture movement. Turner (2006) locates these origins in the New

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Communalists’ rejection of politics in the 1960s, and embrace of cybernetics and
technology as media for social and political change. Their mix of countercultural
rebelliousness, techno-utopianism, and distrust of political institutions animated
the Silicon Valley ethos that underpins technological optimism and determinism
that frames tech as “essential to personal empowerment and cultural change”
(Levina & Hasinoff, 2017, p. 491). This emergent “hip computer capitalism”
(Curran, 2016, p. 40) naturalizes tech deregulation and growth as fundamentally
disruptive, in tune rather than in tension with the sector’s socially-progressive
goals. Previous research reveals that this tension pervades tech industry dis-
courses, including tech CEOs’ political construction of new business discourses
in financial manifestos (Dror, 2015), and Mark Zuckerberg’s discursive construc-
tion of Facebook in public statements (Hoffmann, Proferes, & Zimmer, 2018).
Since elite discourses about technologies can influence their regulation (Streeter,
1987), examining the discursive and ideological arsenal of the tech lobby can illu-
minate the mechanisms behind the elite power it represents.

Methodology

As case studies of tech industry lobbying, I selected Amazon, Facebook, Google,

Netflix, and Twitter. As some of the largest global tech companies, they significantly
invest in lobbying and have increasingly become imbricated in policy conversations,
from antitrust to copyright to privacy and surveillance to net neutrality and, more
recently, disinformation and propaganda. Although they operate in global markets,
the focus here falls exclusively on their political activities in the United States, where
laws governing lobbying are especially permissive and the practice is prevalent.
To provide an account of their lobbying expenditures and policy priorities, I
extensively relied on federally-mandated lobbying expenditure disclosures, from
the publicly available House of Representatives database (“Lobby Disclosures
Search,” 2016). First, I collected all the reports available in the database that were
filed on behalf of these companies (n = 1,244), ranging from 2005 to the third
financial quarter of 2016. Using these disclosures, I aggregated both the amount of
reports filed and the lobbying spend of each company per year to provide insight
into the extent of their engagement in lobbying (Table 1). Second, out of these
reports I coded a representative random sample (n = 150) to identify the issues
their lobbies targeted. Using the emergent issue categories, I tallied total reports
filed by each company for each issue in the larger dataset to examine their policy
priorities (Table 2). Although the reports include lobbying spend, the majority list
several policy issues, making it impossible to disaggregate investment per issue.
Rather than risk reporting an inflated sum, I provide the total mentions of a coded
policy issue per company.

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Since these reports often lack detailed descriptions of issues lobbyists engage
(e.g., “privacy issues” or the name of a bill) and clients’ stances on them, I consulted
trade and news coverage of these companies’ lobbying activities on the policy issues

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identified in the lobbying disclosures. These sources provide crucial contextual
information, including policy stances, lobbying strategies, and accounts of the
revolving door, which I supplemented with revolving door data from the Center for
Responsive Politics (Center for Responsive Politics, 2016). Collectively, they reveal
the extent of the tech lobby’s political involvement.
Examining the ideological dimensions of policy discourses can expose how pol-
icy actors construct and reproduce power relations by defining the terms of policy
debates (Pickard, 2013). Shedding light on how ideology operates in tech lobbyist
discourses can reveal how tech elite power operates through its lobbies and contri-
butes to discursive capture. I examined company executive and lobbyist quotes
from trade coverage, and public policy statements from these companies’ and major
tech lobby groups’ websites, including the Internet Association and Reform
Government Surveillance. Mindful that such statements are not “simply propa-
ganda or advertising, but rather (…) a deep-seated ideology and belief in the posi-
tive power of technology” (Levina & Hasinoff, 2017, pp. 491–492) with a specific
historical and cultural lineage (Turner, 2006), I critically analyzed the discourses
these companies’ lobbyists promote, with a focus on their underpinning ideological
assumptions and their strategic function to forge alignment and maneuver potential
conflicts with the state.

The tech lobby

Investment and policy issues

An increasingly prominent voice in politics, the tech industry is among the top 20
biggest lobbying industries, spending nearly as much as the defense and telecom
industries in 2017, and outspending the commercial banking sector (Center for
Responsive Politics, 2018). Its lobby is a multi-million-dollar enterprise. As Table 1
shows, tech giants spent nearly $247 million on lobbying since 2005, which repre-
sents just under one-tenth of a percent of their combined assets (Forbes, 2016a,
2016b, 2016c, 2016d, 2016e). Thus, given their size, barriers to lobbying are negligi-
ble. Their lobbying expenditures and the amount of lobbying (reports filed) roughly
reflect the depth of their engagement, with Google as the biggest lobbyist, and
Twitter, relatively new to lobbying, the smallest.
Generally, the more these companies spend, the more lobbyists they employ and
the more issues they can engage politically. The reports reveal that, as McChesney
(2013) and Drutman (2015) observe, tech companies frequently lobby on intellec-
tual property, tax reform, and immigration issues. They also target privacy, online
advertising, cybersecurity, broadband, and net neutrality legislation, all of which
affect their business models. Google also massively lobbies on “competition issues,”
likely to deflect unwanted regulatory attention to its size and search business

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P. Popiel The Tech Lobby

practices (Smith, 2015). As Table 2 shows, the companies place different emphases
on various issues related to the specific business model of each company. Yet, while
they may diverge in issue prioritization, they share common goals, to which their

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joint membership in the Internet Association (2018), a prominent tech lobbying
group, attests.
The reports also reveal a focus on issues not typically associated with tech policy,
yet crucial to these firms’ expanding operations. For example, lobbying efforts on
renewable energy reflect these companies’ efforts to make their power-draining data
centers, one of their biggest expenditures, more cost-efficient (Baraniuk, 2016; Joyce,
2016). In addition to the collective push for broadband expansion, Facebook and
Google lobby for reforming international aviation laws to support their efforts to
expand Internet access using drones (Simonite, 2015). Amazon, which experiments
with drone-operated package delivery, also invests in aviation regulation (Breland &
McCabe, 2016). The companies also prominently lobby on trade issues, notably sup-
porting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement for its contribution to
the growth of the Internet sector by, for instance, strengthening copyright agree-
ments (Internet Association, 2016). The pervasiveness of their political engagement
is reflected in the variety of other issues they disclose in their lobbying reports
including health-related initiatives, the Defending Public Safety Employees
Retirement Act, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reform, federal budget
issues, online wine sales, and accessibility of public information. This range of issues
reveals the embeddedness of the tech sector in economic, political, and social life.

Ideological alignment and discursive capture

Underlying the justification behind these lobbying efforts is a unifying ideological
thread: the centrality of the tech sector to economic growth, the self-evident impera-
tive of sustaining the Internet economy, and regulation as the enemy of innovation
and, by extension, social progress. The mission statement of the Internet
Association serves as an example:
The unique nature of the Internet, free from government control, has unleashed
unprecedented entrepreneurialism, creativity and innovation (…) the Internet’s
decentralized and open model has been the catalyst that has powered this
information revolution (…) The Internet provides incredible benefits to our
economy and to society at large. Policymakers must understand that our
country, and the world, depends on a free Internet. (Backerman, 2012)
Rooted in what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) call the “Californian Ideology”
(see also Turner, 2006, p. 208), it reflects a vision that blends technological
determinism, utopianism, and libertarianism, with what Morozov (2014) calls
“Internet-centrism” to strategically equate government oversight with restrictive
control, lobbying for the tech sector’s regulatory autonomy.
Variants of this argument pervade the statements of lobbyists and executives on
policy issues, such as privileging the tech sector’s contribution to the economy. For

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instance, the Internet Association proclaimed in its support for the TPP that it
“recognizes the Internet as an essential American export [and] supports the Internet
economy” (Internet Association, 2016). With regard to immigration reform, the

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CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group argued that it “strengthens Silicon
Valley and America’s Innovation Economy” (O’Brien, 2013). These statements also
wed tech innovation to U.S. dominance on the international stage to solicit policy
support.
Lobbyists also frame technology as a solution to pressing social issues, visible in
the lobbying efforts of companies like Amazon and Google for policies stimulating
greater tech involvement in the financial sector. The group emphasizes technology
as a palliative to many of the financial sector’s problems: “Whether it is protecting
consumers, growing small businesses, or promoting financial literacy (…) new tech-
nologies can help solve today’s policy challenges” (Hebbard, 2015). Tech apps, it
argues, will “reduce barriers and enhance access for the underserved, enable real-
time payments clearing processes, expand the online marketplace for consumer and
small business lending” (Hebbard, 2015). The promise of technological fixes, which
elides structural problems underpinning growing inequality, masks that these apps
ultimately serve to facilitate the smooth flow of capital.
These discursive strategies are essential to exerting policy pressure on the state.
As the president of the Internet Association stated, “[o]ur top priority is to ensure
that elected leaders in Washington understand the profound impacts of the Internet
and Internet companies on jobs, economic growth and freedom” (Breland &
McCabe, 2016). As Turner (2006) shows, politicians’ interest in the Internet and
computing exploded in the 1990s, particularly through the discursive alignment of
tech with economic growth. Tech companies recognize this. As a Google spokesper-
son said, “Technology is a huge part of the current policy discussion in
Washington, and it will be for a long time. We think it is important to have a strong
voice in the debate [demonstrating how we] keep the Internet open and fuel eco-
nomic growth” (Smith, 2015).
The ideological reverb of openness, innovation, freedom, and economic growth
resonates with politicians and state neoliberalism, contributing to discursive capture.
For instance, Senator John Thune, who has oversight over the Communications,
Technology, and the Internet Subcommittee, redeployed these terms in an op-ed
calling for stimulating tech innovation through deregulation:
The PC and the Internet have been powerful engines for economic growth,
personal expression and disruptive change (…) This suits our country well
because our heritage is rooted in individualism and a pioneer spirit, which may
explain why no country in the world takes better advantage of these
technologies or creates more of them. (Thune, 2013)
His rationale rehearses the tech ethos, pairing technological determinism, dis-
ruptive innovation, American exceptionalism, and the myth of the garage entrepre-
neur to call for reducing corporate tax rates, among other policy proposals.

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The tech sector is increasingly embedded in politics due to its growing centrality
to political campaigning (Kreiss, 2016; Kreiss & McGregor, 2018). For example, the
relationship between the Obama administration and Silicon Valley began during

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the 2008 presidential campaign. As one tech donor to Obama put it, “the campaign
and the president believed you could beat the system using technology (…) betting
the whole campaign on the principle that disruptive tech can take down an unbeat-
able giant” (Kang & Eilperin, 2015). Such collaboration paved the way for a revolv-
ing door between Silicon Valley and the administration, which serves as a powerful
conduit for entrenching that ideology within the state. As Table 1 reveals, most of
the companies’ lobbyists passed through the revolving door. For instance, Nicole
Wong, the former chief technology officer, worked as an executive at Google and
Twitter, Google chairman Eric Schmidt joined the President’s Council of Advisers
on Science and Technology, and other Google employees have joined Commerce,
Defense, Education, Justice, and State departments (Dayen, 2016; Kang & Eilperin,
2015). The fact that the revolving door has frequently swung both ways likely facili-
tated lobbyist access to officials: Google’s lobbyists visited the White House more
than once a week on average since the beginning of the Obama presidency through
2015, with Google’s top lobbyist logging 128 meetings (Dayen, 2016).
The interlocking nature of the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Obama
White House facilitated a form of informal quid pro quo. Various employees from
the sector assisted with Obama’s tech policy agenda, countering violent extremism
online, and fixing the healthcare.gov website (Dayen, 2016; Kang & Eilperin, 2015).
Meanwhile, Obama publicly supported the net neutrality rules the FCC was debating,
and which the tech sector favored (Kang & Eilperin, 2015). He defended Facebook
and Google against European regulators, arguing their efforts aim to protect less capa-
ble companies: “We have owned the Internet. Our companies have created it,
expanded it, perfected it, in ways they can’t compete” (Dayen, 2016). Invoking U.S.
tech dominance to brush off European concerns about anti-competitive behavior
reveals the ideological alignment between Silicon Valley and the state. Despite initial
public misgivings about the Trump Administration, tech envoys privately engaged
the White House to advance their multi-issue agendas (Romm, 2017). Echoing
Obama, Trump also equated tech with disruptive innovation: “Government needs to
catch up with the technology revolution” (Jackson & Schwartz, 2017). Obama best
articulated this U.S. tech exceptionalism by contrasting the unwieldy, outdated, and
deferential state with a rapid, unstoppable, and endlessly innovative tech sector:
[t]here’s not a problem out there where young entrepreneurs are not already
finding innovative solutions (…) The key is to build (…) regulatory structures
so that they’re not getting bottled up and frustrated by old creaky systems. And
the goal for the U.S. government is to continue to speak up on behalf of these
entrepreneurs (…) and also work with their governments. (Balakrishnan, 2016)
This reflects discursive capture by an ideological vision in which political solu-
tions become supplanted by unregulated technological innovation.

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Elite power and its fault lines: antitrust and privacy/surveillance

Tech elites capitalize on these shared ideologies and proximate relationships,
deploying them towards their own strategic ends, which are often at odds with these

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narratives. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, stated in 2010 that “Washington is an
incumbent protection machine [and] technology is fundamentally disruptive”
(Thompson, 2010). By 2011, Google was fighting off competitors’ antitrust accusa-
tions targeted at its search business and the increasing threat of an Federal Trade
Commission investigation (Hamburger & Gold, 2014). The company’s lobbying
expenditures on antitrust issues skyrocketed along with reports mentioning the sub-
ject, sextupling since 2010. That Google found itself in the same position as the for-
mer tech incumbent Microsoft did in the 1990s was not lost on the company. It
supplemented its close relationship with the Obama administration with hiring for-
mer regulators and prominent Republicans, meetings with The Heritage
Foundation and John Kerry to plead its case, and spending $25 million on lobbying
the issue (Romm, 2013). Having learned from Microsoft’s failures, the Internet giant
launched a lobbying and PR effort persuading D.C. that, in the words of one of its
lobbyists, “technology is such a fast-moving industry that regulatory burdens would
hinder its evolution [given that the] definition of competition in the tech industry is
also different and constantly changing” (Alden, 2013). The efforts paid off and
Google walked away with self-imposed pledges to alter some of its search and ad
practices, avoiding an antitrust trial that befell Microsoft in the 1990s (Romm, 2013;
Weismann, 2016). The experience illuminates the schism between the official credo
of technological disruption and the practice of maintaining a monopoly. It also
reflects the degree of power these companies exert through their lobbies.
Nevertheless, this interlocking relationship has its fault lines, as lobbying on pri-
vacy and surveillance issues reveals. The political economy of the tech sector, particu-
larly with its reliance on advertising for revenue (McChesney, 2013, p. 151), accounts
for the contradictions within the privacy debate. The companies’ insistence on self-
regulation of user data collection reflects their desire to sell advertisers rich data and
targeted ad space on their platforms to feed their businesses. Compliance with gov-
ernment data requests, on the other hand, particularly following Snowden’s revela-
tions, causes a PR nightmare, jeopardizing their business models (Cain Miller, 2014).
The companies examined here vocally opposed privacy bills that threatened their data
collection practices. However, they supported ones that permitted disclosing govern-
ment data requests to their users and required federal agencies to obtain warrants
before requesting user data. Lobbying for transparency and due process in govern-
ment data requests intended to control the fallout from Snowden’s revelations.
Yet lobbying on curbing government surveillance reveals a mixed record of suc-
cess. For instance, Amazon, Facebook, and Google lobbied the government on bills
like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) Amendments Act of 2013,
which would have allowed them not to disclose consumer information to the gov-
ernment without a warrant, and the Federal Information Security Amendments

576 Communication Culture & Critique 11 (2018) 566–585

P. Popiel The Tech Lobby

(FISA) Act of 2013, which would have provided additional oversight over FISA
courts that issue such warrants (Grande, 2013b; Kloc, 2013). Both bills died in
Congress (GovTrack, 2016b, 2016e). Nevertheless, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, which

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these companies supported, did pass (GovTrack, 2016a; Mearian, 2016). The act
renewed many provisions of the expiring U.S. Patriot Act, but also allowed tech
companies to disclose government requests for user data (GovTrack, 2016a), sug-
gesting they cared more about maintaining their own transparency than curtailing
government data collection.
Indeed, while the tech giants’ lobbies achieved mixed results in reforming the
state’s surveillance apparatus, they successfully reframed the privacy debate as one
about government surveillance. For example, Facebook, Google, and Twitter co-
founded the “Reform Government Surveillance” lobby group (Reform Government
Surveillance, 2015), in strategic response to the Snowden revelations. In a 2013 letter
to Congress, the group stated that:
(…) this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform
government surveillance practices worldwide. (…) we are focused on keeping
users’ data secure [and are] pushing back on government requests to ensure that
they are legal and reasonable in scope. (Reform Government Surveillance, 2015)
As its member and Microsoft’s Executive VP Brad Smith stated “People won’t
use technology they don’t trust. Governments have put this trust at risk, and gov-
ernments need to help restore it” (Reform Government Surveillance, 2015). The
group’s letter to the Senate echoed this sentiment:
(…) the balance (…) has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the
rights of the individual (…) Confidence in the Internet, both in the U.S. and
internationally, has been badly damaged over the last year. (Reform
Government Surveillance, 2014)
Another letter described their efforts as seeking to “reaffirm user trust in the
Internet, and promote innovation” (Reform Government Surveillance, 2015).
Consequently, the lobby group framed the state as disrupting the primacy of the
Internet and depicted the tech sector as its defender, ultimately obscuring its own
data collection practices.
This deliberate framing also downplayed the extensive list of these companies’
lobbying efforts to kill legislation that curbed their own user data collection efforts,
which proved more fruitful than those aimed at state surveillance. For instance,
Facebook and Google defeated the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011
(Grande, 2013a), which would have established a stronger regulatory framework
over consumer privacy rights (GovTrack, 2016c). Amazon, Facebook, Google, and
Twitter successfully opposed the Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011, which sought
to curb consumer user data collection by online providers (GovTrack, 2016d;
Melvin, 2012). Similarly, Google employed its lobby to contain the fallout of its
obstruction of an FCC investigation into user data collection conducted by its Street

Communication Culture & Critique 11 (2018) 566–585 577

The Tech Lobby P. Popiel

View cars over Wi-Fi, walking away with a $25,000 fine (Weismann, 2016). Thus,
privacy and surveillance reveal the tricky political terrain tech lobbyists maneuver
to protect the interests of their clients.

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Discussion

The new media elites’ power manifests itself through its significant investment in and
mastery of political lobbying. The range of issues on which these companies lobby
not only reflects the depth of their political involvement, but also its pervasiveness.
Even issues typically extending beyond Internet or media policy, like aviation regula-
tion or payment systems, have become subsumed under these companies’ business
purview. This growing ubiquity adds weight and inevitability to their ideological
vision of their role in political life.
The variant of neoliberalism which permeates these lobbying efforts combines
utopian techno-libertarianism (Turner, 2006) with what Morozov (2014, p. 10) calls
“Internet-centrism”—a technologically-deterministic view of the Internet as an auton-
omous, ahistorical medium—and “solutionism,” namely the belief that technology
alone can fix many pressing social problems. This ideological framing strategically
masks these companies’ market power and influence, and the tension between their
libertarianism and social progressivism, which endeared them to the center-left.
Indeed, while they support immigration reform, gun control, taxes for the wealthy,
and universal healthcare, they oppose labor unions, state-run social programs for the
poor, government regulation of their industry, and prioritize fast economic growth
over income equality (Broockman, Ferenstein, & Malhotra, 2017). Thus, their political
philosophies support structures that contribute to social inequality.
Despite their contradictions, these discourses resonate with politicians because
of the underlying neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, and possibly because
the tech sector is increasingly embedded in politics and political campaigning
(Kreiss, 2016; Kreiss & McGregor, 2018). The ensuing “discursive capture”
(Pickard, 2015, p. 218) reflects the “interlocking nature” (Freedman, 2015, p. 7) of
the relationship between the tech sector and the state. Characterized by mutual pro-
jects, quid pro quos, and a two-way revolving door, it facilitates lobbyist access to
the state, which in turn injects, reinforces, and naturalizes the elites’ ideologically-
inflected interests. These relationships comprise what Lessig (2011, pp. 110–111)
refers to as “gift economies,” oriented around exchanges, informational or other-
wise, that create obligations later invoked toward achieving particular outcomes.
Although they take the guise of authentic relationships, the gift economy exerts a
powerful structural force. Indeed, these companies advise and assist the state, while
the state often leniently treats their monopoly behavior and exercise of market
power. While the concrete effects of lobbying are difficult to assess methodologi-
cally, particularly due to lack of transparency, the imprint of discursive capture ren-
ders itself visible in policymakers’ rehearsal of tech discourses coupled with an
unwillingness to regulate the tech sector.

578 Communication Culture & Critique 11 (2018) 566–585

P. Popiel The Tech Lobby

Tech companies capitalize on ideological alignment and proximate relationship

with the state, and strategically deploy their lobbies to not only target legislation
that may benefit their bottom line, but also utilize it to ward off unwanted govern-

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ment intrusion into their business operations and to draw public attention away
from their own questionable practices, such as the massive, self-regulated user data
collection. By emphasizing the disruptive dynamism of the tech industry and its
importance to economic growth, they protect the free and open flow of consumer
data against government intrusion. The resultant permissiveness of the state
towards incumbent tech companies resembles what Pasquale (2015) refers to as
“circularity”:
“capture” is too static a term for what is really going on (…) The new regulatory
environment favors certain firms and disadvantages others. The firms boosted
by the new order have even more cash to influence newer orders. (p. 207)
This dynamic process provides a partial explanation for the increasingly inten-
sive investment in lobbying: withdrawal translates into a loss of access and potential
influence.
On the other hand, lobbying efforts are not a guarantee of outcomes. For
example, the Snowden revelations set the tech giants against the federal govern-
ment; an instance of fracture in the interlocking relationship in the name of
national security. To maneuver the schism, tech lobbyists did not frame the mas-
sive state surveillance apparatus as a violation of privacy rights. Instead, they
drew attention to the state’s role in undermining user trust in the Internet and
consequently threatening tech business models. They also sought to contain the
fallout by lobbying for transparency and due process legislation, framing the state
as the threat to user privacy. Although lobbying achieved mixed results in surveil-
lance reform, it effectively redirected attention away from these companies’ own
data collection practices.
Like concrete regulatory or legislative outcomes, such redirection is not a
given. As Freedman (2014) argues about media elites, tech elite power rests on
internal, structural contradictions of capitalism, which render that power contest-
able when they become visible. High-profile data leaks, hackings, pervasive online
hate speech, reports of electoral interference, and other forms of market failure
all test the resilience of tech exceptionalism and tech elites’ ability to draw state
and public attention away from such crises and their responsibility for them. The
durability of this power depends largely on its effective exercise to subsume these
cracks into the elites’ ideological fold. Moreover, just as fractures emerge in the
relationship with the state, they can emerge among the elites themselves.
Although this account examined issues related to the tech sector as a whole and
though the companies examined here belong to several of the same lobbying
organizations, they do not necessarily share the same priorities. Exploring the
degree to which they diverge can shed more light on the way elite power both
asserts itself and becomes vulnerable.

Communication Culture & Critique 11 (2018) 566–585 579

The Tech Lobby P. Popiel

Conclusion
While new media elites’ interests do not always align with the state, as the privacy
case reveals, corporate lobbying always deprioritizes the public interest in favor of

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commercial interests. For example, government surveillance became a lobbying
issue only when the practice threatened the tech sector’s business models. As Brown
(2015) notes, under neoliberalism, “as an economic framing and economic ends
replace political ones, a range of concerns become subsumed to the project of capital
enhancement, recede altogether, or are radically transformed as they are ‘econo-
mized’” (p. 22). When the tech lobby pushes the agenda of its clients, regardless of
whether it benefits the public, issues of public interest like immigration reform, free-
dom of expression online, renewable energy, and broadband access become “econo-
mized,” gaining legitimacy only in the context of technological and economic
growth. This fuels the “increasing power of large corporations to fashion law and
policy for their own ends, not simply crowding out, but overtly demoting the public
interest” (Brown, 2015, p. 43).
The point is not only that the tech sector sometimes lobbies for issues that
undermine the public interest, but that public interest issues are no longer worth-
while in and of themselves. Consequently, lobbying power also manifests itself as
the incorporation of such issues under its elite interest umbrella, relegating the pub-
lic interest to the status of a mere positive externality. Thus, the practice crowds out
democratic notions, like “a body politic, public good, or political culture” (Brown,
2015, p. 168). It contributes to a regime in which “[w]hat remains of representative
democracy is overwhelmed, if not totally though legally corrupted by money power”
(Harvey, 2005, pp. 77–78).
However, lobbying is ultimately just one of several, often less visible instruments
of the media elite’s ideological reproduction and influence on the state, which
include funding academic work that supports its corporate positions (Dayen, 2015)
and forming strategic alliances with advocacy groups to exert pressure on the state
(Jerome, 2011). Such endeavors aim to increase the stamp of corporate power in
often subtle ways and thus carry significant implications not only for media policy
and regulation, but also for media activism and reform, as well as democratic pro-
cesses more broadly. Scrutinizing such instances of media elite power remains a key
task in preserving the crucial democratic functions of communications; and thus of
political economy.

Supplementary material
Supplementary material is available at Communication, Culture & Critique online.

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