SHT - Tech lobby loses clout in Washington

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News : One Thread

Get the Austin360 Newsletter

Daily Headlines, Right to your inbox Tech lobby wakes up to lost clout in Washington

By Marilyn Geewax American-Statesman Washington Staff Sunday, August 26, 2001

ASPEN, Colo. -- In the golden era when technology stocks were soaring, tech executives not only could get investors to give them billions, they could get Congress to pass the laws they wanted.

A moratorium on Internet taxes. Done.

More visas for highly skilled immigrant workers. Done.

Electronic signatures to close legal transactions. Done.

And on and on. The tech lobby, barely alive in 1990, found itself racking up one legislative victory after another by the decade's end.

But this year, as stock prices plunge, the tech industry's stock may be falling on Capitol Hill as well. Since convening in January, the 107th Congress has focused on traditional issues such as taxes, energy and health care. Bills dealing with computer exports, Internet taxes and high-speed Internet access have stalled.

There's even talk that the shakeout among tech companies may echo down the K Street lobbying corridor, where the sector is represented by dozens of interest groups with sometimes overlapping missions.

The industry is sobering up to find that in Washington, it is "dwarfed by the clout of older trade and sector associations like the Business Roundtable, the chambers of commerce, organized labor, AARP," Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., said in Aspen last week at a panel discussion titled "Has the Tech Sector Lost Its Clout?"

Her remarks at the annual tech conference sponsored by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a Washington research group that studies the digital revolution, reflected the somber mood as panelists assessed the industry's ability to keep its winning streak alive.

"Certainly in the last few years, it has had a good run," said panelist Robert Atkinson, vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a liberal policy group in Washington.

Recalling when members of Congress' Joint Economic Committee invited top tech executives to advise them on policy last year, Atkinson said, "It was like Mick Jagger coming to town."

"It was just an incredible sort of euphoria -- wanting to get with it. Members of Congress I talked to didn't know that much about it. But they wanted to learn more about it; they wanted to be part of this whole revolution," Atkinson said.

Tech executives should not be looking for that red carpet again, lobbying experts say.

"Now that the industry has lost its mystique, it's like every other lobby in town," said Michael Cornfield, associated research professor and director of the Democracy Online Project at George Washington University.

"Before the crash of the Nasdaq and the loss of luster, there may have been an extra allure to the high-tech lobbyists because elected officials saw high-tech as a way to generate fantastic amounts of revenue," he said.

With so many of their companies now struggling, tech lobbyists must take their place in line along with farmers, steel workers, automakers and others hoping for help from Congress.

"There isn't anything special about them anymore," Cornfield said.

Just a decade ago, most companies involved in developing new technologies didn't much care whether Congress was paying attention to them or not.

"The tech industry, at the start of the 1990s, had this attitude that they didn't need to play the `Washington game.' They felt they were out there on their own and that the government had nothing to do with them," said Bill Shingleton, lobbying researcher for the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group that tracks money in politics.

Feelings were mutual

The feeling of indifference was mutual, he said. "Congress didn't know what to make of the tech industry, and the industry really didn't need anything from Washington, so there was very little lobbying going on. "

The center calculated that computer equipment and services companies spent only $26.2 million on lobbying in 1997. By 1999, the most recent year for which data is available, the figure had nearly doubled to $51 million.

Shingleton said the pace of spending exploded in the late 1990s, when Microsoft started battling an antitrust suit filed by the U.S. Justice Department.

"All of a sudden, they realized that they had no political protection because they hadn't been spending the money on lobbying and political campaigns," he said.

At the same time, other tech companies realized that they, too, had problems that needed legislative solutions. For example, worker shortages fueled a need to loosen restrictions on visas for skilled foreign labor, and the creation of much more powerful computers increased pressure to remove export controls.

As tech money poured into Washington, more lobbying groups were formed or expanded. Today, technology-driven companies are represented by dozens of trade groups with names such as the Information Technology Association of America, the Information Technology Industry Council, the Business Software Alliance and the AeA, formerly the American Electronics Association.

Will groups merge?

With their missions often overlapping, speculation has been growing that some groups may be forced to consolidate. Last week, the National Journal's Technology Daily, an online publication, reported that the Information Technology Industry Council and the Computer Systems Policy Project are discussing a merger.

Rhett Dawson, president of the industry council, called the story premature. But he said he does expect some consolidation among lobbying groups.

"I don't think anything is going to happen very suddenly, but it's probably a natural thing," he said.

With annual dues for a group often totaling many hundreds of thousands of dollars, profit-starved tech companies may decide to drop out of some efforts.

"I think companies are going to take a very hard look at that in the coming year," said Herschel Abbott Jr., vice president of governmental affairs for BellSouth Corp.

But Dawson said tech companies may be wise to keep spending.

Talk of downsizing "is coming at a time when the industry really needs the best representation in Washington, because more and more, we're seeing pressure to regulate" tech companies. For example, tough new privacy laws now under consideration could alter electronic commerce. In addition, "we'd like the government to figure out how to accelerate deployment" of broadband Internet access, he said.

"We really can't let our guard down," he said.



-- Anonymous, August 26, 2001


Moderation questions? read the FAQ