Facebook To Form Its Own Political Action Committee
28th September 2011
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
Any company with a national presence has to spend money on lobbying — nothing nefarious about that; it’s a simple matter of self-defense. As Microsoft found out back in the 1990s, if you don’t pay for lobbyists, you get screwed by the government on behalf of your business rivals, who do pay for lobbyists — hence the anti-trust litigation that never accomplished anything but wasted millions of taxpayer and company dollars. The lawyers got fat, though, which was apparently one of its objectives. Nobody in the tech sector ever forgets that lesson.
Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying that, when legislators can determine what gets bought and sold, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators. Willie Brown, out in California, had this down to an art when he was Speaker of the California state legislature — he would introduce some bullshit regulatory legislation that would effectively destroy a company’s business, then drop it when they saw the light and contributed to his political war chest.