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The heads of Big Tech companies and their allies in the media are not happy about it. According to the anti-monopoly group American Economic Liberties Project, the Wall Street Journal has published at least 69 op-eds, editorials, or letters criticizing Khan.

On July 13, House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are holding a hearing with Khan where they are expected to attack her over the FTC’s ongoing investigation into billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the “Twitter Files” journalists who he granted access to internal company documents, among other things.

Ken Klippenstein, Lee Fang, Jon Schwarz, The Intercept, “BIG BUSINESS’ PLAN TO BLOCK BIDEN’S BAN ON NONCOMPETE AGREEMENTS,” February 3 2023, https://theintercept.com/2023/02/03/ftc-non-compete-agreement-ban/

THE CHAMPIONS OF the “free market” are frantically lobbying to block the Federal Trade Commission’s imminent ban on noncompete agreements, which prevent workers from seeking better-paying jobs or starting new businesses. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby in the country, touts itself as the voice for “competition in the marketplace,” a principle it says is vital for innovation and dynamism in the economy. Despite its rhetoric, the Chamber is mobilizing against a major reform proposed by the FTC to liberate workers from so-called noncompete clauses. Noncompetes have become rampant at large companies, which force many workers to sign them as a condition of employment. Today, about 1 in 5 American workers — some 30 million people — are bound by a noncompete. “This is just another example where support for the ‘free market’ is effectively Calvinball for pro-business groups,” economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research told The Intercept. “They are perfectly happy to effectively redefine the free market when it suits their interests.” Indeed, this phenomenon — of corporations loudly agitating for the “principles” of the “free market” but opposing functioning markets in practice — was recently pointed out by an anonymous commenter on the FTC’s website. The poster, writing in support of the proposed FTC rule, said, “I find it ironic many who support non-compete clauses also claim to support the free market/capitalism, which supposedly thrives off of competition.” This should be no surprise, however. In Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, he points out that “to widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest” of the biggest “merchants and master manufacturers.” Therefore, the public should listen to the arguments of such interests “with the most suspicious attention” since they “have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the publick.” Pro-business groups contend that the FTC does not have the legal authority to issue such a ban. “Attempting to ban noncompete clauses in all employment circumstances overturns well-established state laws which have long governed their use and ignores the fact that, when appropriately used, noncompete agreements are an important tool in fostering innovation and preserving competition,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President for International Regulatory Affairs and Antitrust Sean Heather said in the statement. (The latter argument ignores the variety of other laws that exist protecting businesses’ proprietary information.) On Tuesday, the Chamber and a coalition representing hundreds of employers sent a letter to the FTC, requesting an extension on the comment period to provide industry groups with more time to mount opposition. The FTC announced the rule on January 5. After a 90-day public comment period, the FTC may decide to amend the rule or withdraw it. If the agency moves forward with the noncompete ban, the rule takes effect 180 days after publication of the final regulation. The Chamber-led industry coalition includes the American Hospital Association, the American Bankers Association, National Restaurant Association, and dozens of other employer-led groups that represent the very largest corporations in America. The Chamber has threatened a lawsuit to block the FTC rule. “There is no need to panic,” Jackson Lewis, one of the most aggressively anti-union law firms in the country which advises businesses, wrote in a special report on January 10: “It is still early in the process […] if the final rule is issued, there will be significant and substantial legal challenges to it.” THE PROLIFERATION OF so-called noncompete clauses have flooded into the economy — a phenomenon that has become common even for fast-food workers, clerks, and low-level hospital employees. In 2016, a report from the Treasury Department found that 15 percent of workers without a four-year college degree are subject to noncompete agreements, despite few of such workers possessing trade secrets. The clause generally restricts workers from taking similar employment elsewhere or starting a new business in the future. “It is outrageous that these companies want the right to not have to compete with each other in an open market for employees.” These restrictions have caused alarm among economists and worker advocates. The Economic Policy Institute has found that noncompete clauses have fueled rising inequality by reducing “labor market fluidity” — that is, the ability for workers to change jobs. One of the primary ways a nonunion worker can bargain for a better wage is to threaten to leave for a better paid position elsewhere, a dynamic that is eliminated by noncompete clauses. “It is outrageous that these companies want the right to not have to compete with each other in an open market for employees,” J.W. Mason, an economist at the City University of New York, told The Intercept. “On a competitive market they don’t want to pay what people’s labor would actually be worth.” The FTC’s proposal followed a July executive order by President Joe Biden instructing the agency “to exercise the FTC’s statutory rulemaking authority under the Federal Trade Commission Act to curtail the unfair use of non-compete clauses and other clauses or agreements that may unfairly limit worker mobility.” FTC Chair Lina Khan’s appointment was heralded by progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as “tremendous news” and a “huge opportunity to make big, structural change by reviving antitrust enforcement and fighting monopolies.” Selected to shake up an agency long considered by progressives to be too soft on business, Khan has challenged decades of antitrust law by arguing that there’s a monopoly case against Amazon. And the rule is popular, enjoying support from two-thirds of people currently employed, according to a January 6 poll by Ipsos. Legislators from both parties have introduced bills that also sharply restrict the use of such clauses. “Speak up and file a comment if you have something to say,” Fisher Phillips instructs clients in a frequently asked questions page. “Coordinate with your Fisher Phillips attorney if you would like guidance on this process.” Fisher Philipps has in the past conducted trainings with the Chamber of Commerce instructing employers on noncompetes. A recurring theme in the public comments is medical professionals expressing frustration with noncompetes leaving them unable to hire. “Noncompete clauses force doctors to move out of the state if they [are] wanting to switch jobs and cause them to not pursue jobs in the first place,” wrote Dr. Shiraz Rahim, a physician at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, whose responsibilities include hiring other doctors. “This has contributed to a shortage of doctors across our system and made it impossible to recruit new doctors to our area.” “I previously worked in an underserved area of Ohio where patients had to wait over 6 months to see a medical specialist. My hospital job required a non compete of 20 miles,” writes Florida physician Katherine Lu. “These non completes force physicians to leave the community and their patients if they want to leave their job. I personally had to move with my family to another state to work again after leaving.” In another public comment, Dr. Cordelia Ariel Nason, director of anesthesiology at Northridge Surgical Suites in Nashua, New Hampshire, described the dire consequences of noncompetes, which she says “tips the balance in favor of large companies” that own hospitals and other medical facilities. “These large corporations then hire doctors, coerce them to sign non compete contracts which effectively limits working at the very facilities where they dedicate their lives to,” Nason writes. “And then if working conditions under the company are poor or the company terminates their own contract with the medical facility or the medical facility terminates the contract with the company, the doctor is then unable to work at that facility for themselves or another company that may have more favorable conditions.” TO THE EXTENT that arguments against noncompetes bother to go beyond the procedural questions about the FTC’s authority, they tend to focus on the idea that noncompetes promote innovation by preventing employees from leaving a job and taking trade secrets with them. Indeed, employers frequently argue that noncompete clauses are necessary to protect confidential information, such as marketing strategies or pricing plans. The fear of losing the competitive edge from inside information has fueled the proliferation of such employment contracts. But advocates note that the FTC ban on noncompete clauses, like similar bans enacted in recent years in Maryland and California, do not circumvent existing laws banning the theft of trade secrets and other proprietary information. Employers may still require confidentiality agreements and other restrictive covenants in employment contracts, while allowing former employees to leave and work at competing firms. “Many states, most notably California, have long banned noncompetes; they seem to be doing fine,” said Baker, the economist. “The claims on innovation are pretty obvious nonsense, given California’s dominance of tech.” Another argument advanced by advocates is that noncompetes incentivize employers to invest in training employees, since there isn’t risk of them leaving for a competitor. “There might be some impact on training, but the benefits in the form of higher wages and more frequent startups almost certainly offsets this,” Baker said. Lobbying records show corporate interests are preparing to fight. The HR Policy Association, which represents major employers including McDonald’s Corporation and Johnson & Johnson, has closely tracked the reform effort around noncompete clauses. The National Association of Manufacturers, which represents Toyota, Exxon Mobil, BNSF, and other large employers, reported lobbying the FTC and other federal agencies over noncompete issues. Opposition even extends to the media. The National Newspaper Association, which represents community newspapers across America, signed onto the Chamber letter sent earlier this week. News outlets, like virtually every other industry, have increasingly adopted noncompete clauses in employment contracts, not only for top editors and executives, but also for low-level journalists and other employees.

Rebecca and Karl Evers-Hillstrom, The Hill, “How Big Tech fought antitrust reform — and won,” December 23, 2022 https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3785894-how-big-tech-fought-antitrust-reform-and-won/

Tech giants and their army of industry groups rallied together to stifle a multiyear congressional effort to overhaul antitrust laws, pouring millions into campaigns to block key bipartisan bills targeting the nation’s four largest tech firms. They appear to have prevailed over would-be reformers. Antitrust supporters pushed hard for major legislation to rein in the power of tech behemoths before the close of this year. But while a couple of antitrust reform proposals to give federal and state enforcers more resources and power were added to the $1.7 trillion government funding bill, two key bipartisan measures targeting internet giants failed to make it into end-of-the-year must pass bills, effectively killing their chances of passing this year. And with the GOP set to take control of the House in January, the best opportunity to push them through may now be in the rearview mirror. “When we began this work, we knew we were taking on the largest economic powers in this country. These are gigantic monopolies. And one of the great challenges with monopolies is with tremendous concentrated economic power comes political power,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee. “We knew this was gonna be a tough haul, but it’s not going away. We’re gonna come right back at it,” he added. But when lawmakers return in January, they face an additional hurdle to passing the bills. House Republicans slated for leadership positions — including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is set to chair the key Judiciary Committee — have not joined their colleagues in embracing the antitrust bills and have instead laid out a tech agenda centered on content moderation battles. Supporters said this Congress, with Democrats controlling the House, Senate and White House, represented the best chance to pass the proposals — especially the two bills at the center of the most significant lobbying battle, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open App Markets Act. That time, pressure spurred an all-out blitz from the tech industry, which shoveled millions into expensive lobbying and advertising campaigns to stifle the legislation. Tech giants and their allied trade associations spent $277 million on lobbying in the past two years, six times more than supporters of antitrust legislation, according to a report from Public Citizen citing data from nonpartisan group OpenSecrets. Amazon alone spent $16 million on lobbying over the first nine months of 2022, its largest total through that period in any year on record and the most of any company. Apple also shattered its previous lobbying spending record. Both companies, as well as Meta and Google, would apparently be subject to the two key bills, which together aim to limit companies from preferencing their own products and services over rivals’ and add regulations in the app store marketplace. “They like to call one another rivals, they like to play up the fact that they are competing with each other, but when it mattered, when there was actual reform, there was actual legislation that would have enhance competition between them and the small businesses they try to kill or squash, they banded together in order to prevent that from happening,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Omidyar-funded Tech Oversight Project. The bills advanced with bipartisan support out of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees in the past two years, but neither Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called them for floor votes. A spokesperson for Schumer in August said he was working with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), one of AICOA’s sponsors, to “gather the needed votes” on the legislation and bring it to a vote. But a vote was never called, and Schumer did not publicly address why the bills were not brought to the floor. The Hill reached out to a Schumer spokesperson for comment. Cicilline said the expectation was that the bills would go to the Senate floor first, before the House took action. Supporters of the bills remained steadfast that the votes were there to get the bills across the finish line, though even after they advanced out of the committee level, there were lingering concerns among Democrats that echoed tech positions. “There’s no good reason for these bills not to have had a vote or been sent to the president’s desk. There’s no excuse,” Cicilline said. So how did tech companies and industry groups fight to ensure the bills didn’t reach President Biden? They leveraged big connections, and big money. The tech industry leaned on armies of lobbyists — including ones with professional and personal ties to lawmakers — to urge opposition to the antitrust efforts. Five former top aides to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) lobbied against antitrust bills on behalf of tech giants, along with some of Pelosi’s longtime senior staffers. Schumer, meanwhile, faced calls from progressive groups to recuse himself from the bills because two of his daughters work for tech giants. Jessica Schumer is a registered lobbyist for Amazon in New York, while Alison Schumer is a product marketing manager at Meta. Amazon alone deployed 20 lobbyists with ties to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to oppose AICOA. And two months ago, Sonia Gill, Democrats’ senior counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee who helped draft the antitrust bills, left to become Meta’s public policy manager. Some companies also sent their top executives to Capitol Hill as the session drew to a close to speak with lawmakers, again letting the companies play to their individual strengths. Haworth said Apple CEO Tim Cook was on Capitol Hill “over and over” while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was notably absent because “nobody likes Mark Zuckerberg.” Meanwhile, tech giants’ allies blanketed the airwaves with over $100 million on ads in swing states warning that Congress would “break” Amazon Prime, encourage cyber attacks against the U.S. and undermine data privacy. Cicilline said the tech industry arguments aimed to “distort and misrepresent” what the bills would do through “scare tactics and a lot of misinformation.” Some of the top targets of tech-funded ads — Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) — expressed doubt about prioritizing tech legislation during their tightly contested midterm races, according to two lobbyists working on the issue. “We were simply outgunned,” said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president at Public Citizen, which lobbied for AICOA. “They simply spent more money, had more lobbyists, and pushed as aggressively as they possibly could at the junctures when it really mattered.” Those lobbying efforts only scratch the surface of the tech industry’s sprawling Washington strategy. Tech giants bankrolled dozens of trade associations and advocacy groups that pushed their message when it mattered most. As Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) considered whether to back antitrust bills, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance spent millions on ads in Texas warning that AICOA would empower China in the global technology race. Many senators faced targeted ads in their home states from tech-backed progressive and free market groups. That came after former national security officials with tech ties — including former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats — urged congressional leaders to delay AICOA over security concerns last year. Big Tech didn’t just defeat the antitrust bills — the top priority — but also online privacy bills and legislation to funnel ad revenue from digital platforms to news outlets. The industry pulled off a clean sweep as it successfully painted all of the measures with the same brush. “It is evidence that Goliath won this round, but this is a marathon,” Haworth said. As tech giants continue to flex their political power, Haworth said the “motley crew” of antitrust supporters that banded together over the past couple of years have formed a permanent coalition that will be starting from a stronger position next Congress. Even though a couple of key proposals failed to make it across the finish line this year, supporters of antitrust efforts touted the inclusion of bills to raise merger filing fees for larger deals and allow state attorneys general to choose where antitrust cases are heard in the spending package as a win for their side.

WASHINGTON — After weeks of talks, drug industry lobbyists were growing nervous. To cut a deal with the White House on overhauling health care, they needed to be sure that President Obama would stop a proposal intended to bring down medicine prices.

On June 3, 2009, one of the lobbyists e-mailed Nancy-Ann DeParle, the president’s health care adviser. Ms. DeParle reassured the lobbyist. Although Mr. Obama was overseas, she wrote, she and other top officials had “made decision, based on how constructive you guys have been, to oppose importation” on a different proposal.

The final proposal for addressing Big Tech’s abuse of power is to bypass the legislative approach and pursue more vigorous FTC rulemaking authority. President Biden’s Executive Order reflects this impulse, setting forth policy positions, creating a White House Competition Council, and identifying dozens of anticompetitive concerns that agencies are ordered or encouraged to enact.177 In the Executive Order, the FTC is “encouraged . . . to exercise the [its] statutory rulemaking authority . . . [in] unfair competition in major Internet marketplaces.”178 Consistent with this Executive Order, the FTC updated its rulemaking authority to pave the way for more effective rulemaking to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive trade practices.179 These changes set the stage for the FTC to promulgate administrative rules to address Big Tech’s abuse of its market power. Republican reaction to this Executive Order has been noticeably muted, particularly in light of strong statements of support from the likes of the Republican-leaning trade associations such as the American Farm Bureau, the National Grange, and the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association.180 It remains unclear whether Republicans who are deeply skeptical of Big Tech power will support more vigorous regulatory action in the form of Executive Orders and FTC administrative rules. Part of the answer may depend on whether Big Tech successfully thwarts other avenues of reform.

Alastair Langtry, PhD economics researcher at the University of Cambridge, “Inside the West Wing: Lobbying as a contest,” Journal of Public Economics: Volume 231, March 2024, 105068 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272724000045

This paper puts conflicts and power at the centre of the lobbying process to shed light on how a government spends political capital and sells special treatment. It considers a world where the government makes many different policy decisions and has limited resources. We find that when a government cannot do deals with special interest groups, it adopts a scattergun approach and spreads its political capital across all contests. In stark contrast, a government that can do deals will pick its battles carefully. It will only fight where it can win and will do a deal in all other cases. This mechanism can explain why even weak governments do not appear to lose legislative battles very often. They find it better to not fight at all and gain what they can from cutting a deal. Weak governments fight less, rather than less successfully. It also highlights the important role that backroom deals can play in the wider political landscape. Bilateral deals have indirect impacts on other interest groups, by putting the government in a better position to win other contests. Our model also highlights a tension between efficiency and equal treatment. This is because it shows how the special treatment given to certain interest groups can be part of a bigger picture that improves overall outcomes for the government and society, even if individual deals in isolation harm society. So rules or social norms that seek to prevent the government giving special treatment to some groups may not always be optimal. More nuanced rules, allowing special treatment but preventing members of the government from using contributions to enrich themselves, might be better. The welfare implications of having the government do deals depends on the harmfulness of bad laws. When they are sufficiently harmful, the government will only do deals in order to help win other contests. In this case, allowing deals unambiguously improves welfare. However, when bad laws are less harmful, the government may do deals to build up its stock of political capital beyond the level needed to win contests. This excessive build-up of political capital can reduce welfare. The key contribution is to show how allowing the government to do deals with special interest groups has an important impact on behaviour and outcomes. It shows that, rather than behaving in a scattergun manner, the government picks its battles carefully. It only fights where it can win.

In this article, I have presented a unique approach to the empirical analysis of political influence by interest groups based on the specification and estimation of an all-pay contest with heterogeneous interest groups over policies considered in the US Congress. One of the main contributions of this article is that I debut a novel unit of analysis: policies, which are parts of bills, rather than bills themselves as in previous works. This is particularly relevant for the study of lobbying behaviours because the content of a bill can and often does change throughout the entirety of the legislative process. I show that bill-level analyses which take the content of a bill as exogenously given can generate biased estimates of the effects of lobbying expenditures on policy changes.

Using a newly-constructed dataset that contains information on policies and lobbying activities, I have quantified the effect of lobbying expenditures on the probability that a policy is enacted, and estimated the average returns to lobbying expenditures for or against a policy. I find that the effect of lobbying expenditures on a policy's equilibrium enactment probability is very small. Nonetheless, the average returns from lobbying expenditures are estimated to be over 130%. In this study, I focus on energy policies and lobbying activities targeting these policies by energy firms. Given that lobbying expenditures by the energy sector comprise 12% of all lobbying expenditures, these findings are interesting in their own right, though it remains to be seen whether the results for lobbying in the energy sector will extend to lobbying in other domains. The approach developed in this article can, however, be applied to study the effects of lobbying in other policy domains.

How does regulatory capture emerge? More specifically, how does a policy network take shape and settle on cultural frames that favor one industry, at the potential expense of other interests? In the case of digital trade, technology lobbyists mobilized to promote a libertarian framework for data, drawing on the existing beliefs in laissez-faire economics and the potential for states to distort markets, slow economic growth and restrict innovation. By extending this schema, lobbyists attempted to apply a free market logic to the treatment of data flows for Internet-based commerce. In this section, I demonstrate how technology lobbyists established themselves in the trade policy network while framing support for specific policies to suppress other interests, particularly of intellectual property industries and consumer rights advocates.

5.1 Network embedding

https://www.cato.org/regulation/spring-2021/why-big-tech-likes-weak-ip?fbclid=IwAR0nD2gHEYNiVmzImumMx3sLILLwTa-1aHGmfao8ilRsQDbR5mr__ySLV5E

Specifically, weak‐​IP environments are hospitable for large, integrated firms that maintain internal markets for financing and conducting R&D and then embed the resulting intellectual output in goods and services for the end‐​user market. By contrast, strong‐​IP environments enable entry by smaller firms that specialize in R&D and monetize the resulting intellectual outputs through external relationships with third parties. This organizational distortion matters because larger firms tend to excel in incremental and process‐​related innovation that refines existing technologies while smaller firms tend to excel in product innovation that challenges existing technologies.

But Big Tech—eager to entrench its dominance—has used its clout in Washington to systematically attack the U.S. patent system and disadvantage smaller rivals.

Legislative changes, as well as a number of troubling Supreme Court rulings, have made it more difficult to obtain, defend and enforce patents. For instance, the America Invents Act, passed by Congress in 2011, created a new review process for the patent office. This process usually adds years of delay and makes it considerably more costly to defend one's patents, and increases the risk of losing intellectual property rights—all under lower standards than applied in court.

At the same time, intellectual property (IP) has been under attack in the United States for decades. Just a few years ago in 2018, the Global IP Index, which ranks countries based on their strength of IP enforcement, showed the United States sliding down below its peers to 13th place, tied with Hungary. Narratives about patent trolls, patent thickets, and weak patents have fueled legislative proposals for years, making protection of ideas through patents harder and harder. Many from the university, start-up, and inventor communities raised their voices and appealed to Congress about their reliance on IP rights. But the strongest proponents of such legislative proposals were the Big Tech firms of Silicon Valley.

The economic framework for understanding why weak IP rights are beneficial for large, vertically integrated firms is simple. Today’s economy is knowledge based, with intangible assets (ideas) constituting the majority of the value of any firm, and tangible assets (labor and capital) constituting a diminishing proportion of their value. Firms and individuals invest in developing ideas—for innovative services or products—and need to monetize them to get a return on their investments. This requires a protection of those ideas, lest the ideas are stolen by others before any return is possible. The IP system is a public institution that enables the protection of ideas and inventions. The fundamental tenet of the patent system, for example, is for the government to grant an inventor an exclusive right to make, use, and sell their ideas for a fixed period of time, in exchange for disclosing those ideas to the public and giving them up for free for everyone to use after that period. Without a public institution providing this service, firms and individuals will do what they have always done—private provisioning of public goods—if they have the necessary means. Large and vertically integrated firms have the means to protect their ideas, while small inventors, start-ups, or other unknown sources—which pose the constant threat of disruptive innovation for larger companies—do not.

https://www.cato.org/regulation/spring-2021/why-big-tech-likes-weak-ip?fbclid=IwAR0nD2gHEYNiVmzImumMx3sLILLwTa-1aHGmfao8ilRsQDbR5mr__ySLV5E

Specifically, weak‐​IP environments are hospitable for large, integrated firms that maintain internal markets for financing and conducting R&D and then embed the resulting intellectual output in goods and services for the end‐​user market. By contrast, strong‐​IP environments enable entry by smaller firms that specialize in R&D and monetize the resulting intellectual outputs through external relationships with third parties. This organizational distortion matters because larger firms tend to excel in incremental and process‐​related innovation that refines existing technologies while smaller firms tend to excel in product innovation that challenges existing technologies.

Congress introduced a bill that would hold online marketplace operators, such as Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc. and Walmart Inc., responsible for counterfeit products—particularly unsafe items—sold on their websites. This is an issue U.S. marketplaces have faced for some time.

A bipartisan group of four U.S. House of Representatives members co-sponsored the legislation— called the The Stopping Harmful Offers on Platforms by Screening Against Fakes in E-Commerce (or Shop Safe) Act—to stop online sales of counterfeit products. The group says counterfeit goods sold on online marketplaces is a growing problem because there is no law that adequately requires multi-merchant platforms to vet who is selling and what they’re selling on their sites.

The direct involvement of Big Tech in the political arena merits greater scrutiny. Although the traditional “technolibertarian” position of many actors in Big Tech, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, was to shy away from politics and lobbying, over the years, the threat of regulation and the possibility of incentives have motivated Big Tech towards influencing policy and politics (Chandrasekaran & Mintz, 1999; Zachary, 2010). Big Tech are involved in the political sphere through a variety of mechanisms: (a) direct consultations with the government; (b) lobbying; (c) hiring experts closely working with the governments (revolving door); (d) and funding influential think tanks, universities, and experts (Lindman et al., 2023). Due to their size and technological expertise, tech companies are important political actors. Governments frequently need to work with Big Tech as economic, social, or, as the case of GenAI illustrates, knowledge agents (Sharon, 2021). The lobbying activities of Big Tech further strengthen their position in the political sphere. Big Tech have been salient political financiers in the EU and the US in recent years, donating across parties, individuals, and political levels (Table 2) (Bank et al., 2021; OpenSecrets, 2023). Table 2. [Image Omitted] Furthermore, the role of the revolving door also requires attention. A recent study found that 18% of total appointees in the Department of Commerce were registered lobbyists, including key staff from various Big Tech firms (Warren & Jayapal, 2022). A parallel trend can be noticed in the UK and Europe, where Big Tech have hired ex-politicians, civil servants, and political advisors as their political strategists (Bristow & Clarke, 2023; LobbyControl, 2022). Finally, Big Tech also directly fund or employ experts and expert groups that form part of consultative interest groups around policymaking. This includes funding academic research for “ethics washing” and generating support, supporting influential think tanks, or even working together with industry associations that support their interest (Goldenfein & Mann, 2023; Schyns, 2023). The recent AI Bill introduced in Europe illustrated the effect of this political capital. After the launch of ChatGPT, lawmakers in Europe debated the extent of risk and nature of governance to be imposed on GenAI. However, Big Tech mobilized their lobbying, discursive and consultative power, and their wide-reaching relationship with other influential interest groups to tone down the requirements prescribed in the proposed act (Schyns, 2023).

The tech giants also pushed back on three issues that would undermine their existing approaches to developing foundational models: increased transparency, disclosure of copyrighted materials, and reporting environmental impact. Tech firms argued that transparency – including a requirement to inform someone that they are interacting with an AI – should only apply to “image, audio and video” (Microsoft) or “deep fakes” (Google). Importantly, this would exclude the textual output of LLMs and leave many chatbots, the likes of ChatGPT, free from transparency obligations. The same would go for the search systems of Google and Microsoft, which are increasingly powered by AI. Both Google and Microsoft also argued for the removal of copyright disclosure requirements for foundation models. Large language models are often trained on hundreds of billions of words of text, and many of these include copyrighted materials. Big Tech argued that this was “disproportionate and burdensome” (Microsoft); “unnecessary and difficult to implement” (Google); or “not the right place to regulate copyright” (Meta/Facebook). The fact that Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, and Meta have all been sued for copyright violations presumably had nothing to do with their recommendations on this topic!

For years, the leaders of Meta, Apple, Google and Microsoft have made a show of calling for internet regulation. We can see in retrospect the bad faith behind these efforts, as some of the richest companies in human history put their colossal lobbying operations to work, ensuring that social media remains a lawless frontier. Just like the tobacco industry a generation ago, tech companies have been using every tool available to them behind the scenes to oppose new laws that would require any measure of accountability. Big Tech’s lobbying groups have poured resources into challenging California’s landmark kids online safety law in federal court, where a misinformed judge issued a poorly-reasoned preliminary injunction last year. I know the playbook these companies have used quite well. Prior to my current job, I was a lobbyist for Amazon. I’ve used the same argument — we support regulation, just not this regulation — and with a similar conspicuous absence of workable alternatives. Having once been on the inside, I can tell you with confidence: The tech companies have fooled us all. Now, these same tech giants are now pushing their latest innovation, artificial intelligence. Just like social media, they’re in a race to scale and irrevocably entangle societies with these new products as quickly as possible in order to achieve market dominance.

In 2023, Amazon, Meta, Google parent company Alphabet, and Microsoft each spent more than $10 million on lobbying, according to data provided by OpenSecrets. The Information Technology Industry Council, a trade association, spent $2.7 million on lobbying. In comparison, civil society group the Mozilla Foundation spent $120,000 and AI safety nonprofit the Center for AI Safety Action Fund spent $80,000. Given that the definition of lobbying only includes speaking with staffers about specific laws, these figures likely underestimate the amounts of money that tech companies are spending to influence lawmakers, says Hamza Chaudhry, a U.S. Policy Specialist at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on risks posed by advanced technologies. [GRAPH OMMITED] Multiple advocates and Hill sources suggested that the consistently large amounts spent by the big technology companies has allowed them to build up a sophisticated lobbying apparatus that has so far outgunned the efforts of other organizations. “There's been a sprouting up of all these AI safety lobby groups and also lots of civil society groups that now are starting up their AI focuses, but by far the best at it are the tech groups,” said another Congressional staffer, who also wished to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak about discussions with lobbyists and advocates. Tech companies are able to spend more and thus pay for more experienced lobbyists, who better understand the technical details of their brief better and have a more extensive network on the Hill, the staffer said. “I would still say that civil society—and I'm including academia in this, all sorts of different people—would be outspent by big tech by five to one, ten to one,” says Chaudhry. Public statements vs. private lobbying What exactly is the tech industry lobbying for? Some in the industry are against regulating AI, arguing that regulation would impede technological progress. In December 2023, Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote a blog post that said his firm would support any political candidate who opposed regulation that would stifle innovation.

Big Tech leaders are spending millions of dollars — and pushing dubious national secureporter for rity concerns — to try to prevent federal regulators from forcing them to pay for the copyrighted works their companies are using to train their artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

At issue is a new effort by the US Copyright Office to consider how to apply US copyright law to the nascent AI industry. The matter has triggered impassioned pushback from powerful tech interests who say they must have access to people’s hard work for free, or the future of their industry will be jeopardized.

The federal government has “innumerable tools” to promote competition, Jon Donenberg, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told the Guardian. “But what we have seen in recent generations is a real crawl-back from that forward-leaning perspective.”

Americans expect the government to “set the rules of the road for market capitalism to work effectively”, Donenberg continued. “The president has been very clear that competition promotion is critical across every sector of the economy.”

Chevron's defenders raise a number of concerns with its demise. Chief among them are the following: That old regulatory disputes, decided on deference grounds alone, will be relitigated, thus flooding the courts and upsetting settled expectations; That new policy disputes, arising from new regulations in an era when agencies no longer command deference, will be decided by the courts, not the political branches, under the guise of legal interpretation; and That, between a dysfunctional Congress and a newly neutered executive branch, it will be impossible for our federal government to address hard problems. We think all of these fears are overblown and, to paraphrase Pete Townsend, that in the end the kids will still be all right. As a preliminary observation, the rolling back of Chevron the doctrine will mean that Chevron Corp., the company, can have its name back. Even more, who among us does not look forward to getting on board with the new Relentless Doctrine — a welcome cultural evolution, no less than when soulful 1990s grunge in the vein of Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Nirvana pushed out insipid 1980s glam and pop- rock like Genesis, Bon Jovi and Motley Crue. As for the substantive concerns, we think it unlikely that there will be a rush to the courts to settle old scores on numerous older regulations. Even putting aside potential statute of limitations obstacles, between investment-backed reliance interests and the simple staleness of issues, it seems unrealistic, at least by and large, that otherwise interested parties will want to spend their litigation budgets on the disputes of yesteryear. And even if there is a flood of new cases challenging older agency pronouncements, so what? Inasmuch as Chevron itself does not bind agencies to any particular interpretation,[9] settled expectations would be no more upset by new litigation results than a new administration's change of position, and even less so since any new decision based on what the law actually requires, instead of what the law may permit, would provide more assurance going forward than an older result based on deference alone. As for new regulations that prompt new implementing policies, the suggestion that the courts will be making policy judgments seems overstated. For one thing, interpreting a statute is always a legal function, even if it carries with it implications for policy choices. And in any event, the Supreme Court, at least, has already moved past Chevron, so any official death notice will have limited effect on the high court's current approach to statutory interpretation.