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The Technology Lobby: tracing the contours of new mediaelite lobbying power
1. Introduction
The normative belief that communication and media systems should facilitate
democratic discourse and participation animates research in the political economy
of communication
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
● Such accounts 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
corporations and the neoliberal state, on which media elites rely to push their
agenda
● This can profoundly impact the media landscape, as corporate actors push for
laws and regulations that undermine consumer choice, increase industry
concentration, and threaten user privacy
2. Neoliberal politics and the media lobby
Lobbying involves pressuring public officials to support laws and policies that benefit
lobbyists’ clients
● Its expansion overlaps with the ascendance of neoliberalism, which
champions the market as a key purveyor of economic growth; favors
deregulatory policies, relegating 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
● Lines between state & corporate power blur
Corporate libertarianism
● Reflects neoliberalism’s political vision of corporate freedoms reinforced by an
unregulated market, with a state limited to safeguarding them. The system
facilitates the expansion of media corporate power
Media corporations
● Media corporations also play an active role in influencing the state to secure
their interests, injecting their voice into policymaking processes.
● Of particular concern is the proximity of media elites to the state and their
interlocking nature
○ The often-private intermingling between politicians and media
executives, lobbyists, and others, where corporate and state actors
force out an ideologically-inflected common ground
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, ● 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
Cultural capture
● Which denotes the corporate influence on regulators’ systems of belief, policy
preferences and ideological biases of which they may not be entirely
conscious, yet which arise because of their proximity to the industry itself
Discursive capture
● A discursive narrowing of the range of policy options considered by regulators
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
● 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
→ Lobbying plays a critical role in these processes
3. Tech giants
Tech giants have acquired near-monopoly status in their respective markets globally
● 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.
McChesney identifies two lobbies that exert a considerable commercial influence on
the Internet
● 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
→ 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
4. The tech lobby
4.1. Investment & 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
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, ● The reports also reveal a focus on issues not typically associated with
tech policy, yet crucial to these firms’ expanding operations
● This range of issues reveals the embeddedness of the tech sector in
economic, political, and social life
4.2. 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 imperative of sustaining the Internet economy,
and regulation as the enemy of innovation and, by extension, social
progress.
● Rooted in the ‘Californian ideology’, it reflects vision that blends
technological determinism, utopianism, and libertarianism, with
‘Internet-centrism’ to strategically equate government oversight with
restrictive control, lobbying for the tech sector’s regulatory autonomy
● Lobbyists also frame technology as a solution to pressing social
issues, visible inthe lobbying efforts of companies like Amazon and
Google for policies stimulating greater tech involvement in the
financial sector.
○ These discursive strategies are essential to exerting policy
pressure on the state
● The ideological reverb of openness, innovation, freedom, and
economic growth resonates with politicians and state neoliberalism,
contributing to discursive capture
○ The tech sector is increasingly embedded in politics due to its
growing centrality to political campaigning
○ Interlocking nature between Silicon Valley and the Obama
White House
○ Invoking U.S.tech dominance to brush off European concerns
about anti-competitive behavior reveals the ideological
alignment between Silicon Valley and the state
4.3. Elite power and its fault lines: antitrust and privacy/surveillance
● Nevertheless, this interlocking relationship has its fault lines, as
lobbying on privacy and surveillance issues reveals
○ 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
5. Discussion
● The new media elites ’power manifests itself through its significant investment
in andmastery 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
3
, ● The variant of neoliberalism which permeates these lobbying efforts combines
utopian techno-libertarianism with what Morozov calls Internet-centrism (a
technologically-deterministic view of the Internet as an autonomous,
ahistorical medium) and solutionism, namely the belief that technology alone
can fix many pressing social problems
● The ensuing discursive capture reflects the interlocking nature of the
relationship between the tech sector and the state. Characterized by mutual
projects, 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 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
● 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-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
6. 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 commercial interests
● 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
“economized”, gaining legitimacy only in the context of technological and
economic growth
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, Mazzucato: Mission-oriented innovation policy
1. Introduction
Countries around the world are seeking economic growth that is smart
(innovation-led), inclusive and sustainable. Such ambitious goals require re-thinking
the role of government and public policy in the economy
In this context, industrial and innovation strategies can be key pillars to achieve
transformational change - in particular, by identifying and articulating new missions
that can galvanise production, distribution and consumption patterns across various
sectors
1.1. Reconceptualising the role of the public sector
● Mission-oriented public investments are not about de-risking and
levelling the playing field, but tilting the playing field in the direction of
the desired goals
● Opportunity creation across sectors
● Modern day missions can provide an even more fervent ground for an
ambitious catalytic role for Government in creating and shaping
markets which provide the basis for private investment
1.2. From sectors to missions
● Mission-oriented thinking requires understanding the difference
between
(1) industrial sectors: the boundaries within which a forms operates,
such as health, transport or energy
(2) broad challenges: an area which a nation may identity as a
priority, such as inequality and climate change
(3) concrete problems that different sectors can address to tackle a
challenge
● Missions, on the other hand, involve tackling specific problems, such
as reducing carbon emissions by a given percentage over a specific
year period. They require different sectors to come together in new
ways (for example the Apollo mission)
1.3. Risks, rewards and institutional capacity
● Investments in industrial transformation, R&D, human capital
formation and innovation take time. They involve high risks as there is
no guarantee that the investment will pay off
● Crucial to the implementation of a mission-oriented approach to
innovation policy is the need to reinvigorate capacity building,
competencies and expertise within the state
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