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The Recorder, a daily legal newspaper for Northern California, published a thought-provoking article on Dec. 22 about the rise of Silicon Valley’s tech giants as lobbyists in Washington.
The story kicks off with an anecdote about how Oracle co-president Safra Catz held a fundraiser at her Los Altos Hills home on Nov. 7 for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). The event, which drew contributions ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 per guest, drew high-power tech industry leaders such as Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers, Symantec chairman John Thompson and HP’s general counsel Michael Holston.
The article notes that two weeks after the ‘high-tech, exec-studded fundraiser,’ Boxer and 58 other U.S. senators sent a letter to the European Union, requesting that it speed up its review of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems while thousands of jobs hang in the balance. The author, Zusha Elinson, deftly notes that the letter ‘was an unusual show of support for a merger, especially from a Senate that can hardly agree on anything.’
One could argue that Sen. Boxer and her peers sent the letter to the EU to represent the interests of U.S.-based companies and the thousands of American citizens who are employed by both Oracle and Sun. But that’s not the point. What Elinson’s article drives at is how high-tech giants like Oracle, Microsoft, Intel and Google have become much more aggressive about applying their political muscle for their own special interests.
For instance, according to the story and one of its sources, OpenSecrets.org, Oracle leads high-tech companies with money paid to lobbyists through the first three quarters of 2009 with $4.05 million. Google, which has coughed up $2.91 million for its lobbying efforts through Sept., has been pressing to change a bill `that would prevent Internet companies from doing business with repressive regimes like China,’ according to the story.
On a more socially-conscious note, Intel, which has spent $2.86 million on its lobbying efforts, is attempting to push through a bill that would prevent high-tech companies from purchasing minerals from African warlords.
None of this is surprising but it is revealing. Whether you’re the CIO of a Fortune 100 company or the owner/operator of an SMB, it’s nice (or in some cases disturbing) to know what pet projects your organization’s hard-earned IT dollars are being used to support.
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