Political Version Of Access Gets Less Microsoft Money

from the well,-now-that-that's-all-done dept

A very interesting look into the evolution of Microsoft’s lobbying efforts. It was well known a decade ago (even half a decade ago) that Microsoft wasn’t the best at lobbying DC. They liked to be left to themselves and focus on writing software and/or viciously crushing various competitors (depending on your point of view). Then, they realized that the government might pull out that old “anti-trust” card, and the money started pouring out of Redmond into DC. Of course, in the past couple of years, it seems that political contributions from Microsoft have been declining. It seems that all the important politicians they needed to buy off have done their job by making the anti-trust case meaningless.


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Comments on “Political Version Of Access Gets Less Microsoft Money”

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2 Comments
dorpus says:

Faustian Bargain

All the talk of setting up internet monitoring systems. Microsoft wants to make friends with the government. Naturally, Microsoft will get more involved in spook stuff. They’ll make more obscure little features deep in the operating system to aid law enforcement or national security interests. The different foreign versions of Microsoft are known to be quite different under the hood; probably loaded with nooks and crannies for spooks. Operating systems quietly talking to the internet to monitor the activity of culprits.

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