Amazon, Google Busted Faking Small Business Opposition To Antitrust Reform

Too Much Free Time

from the fake-plastic-trees dept

For decades now, a favorite DC lobbying tactic has been to create bogus groups pretending to support something unpopular your company is doing. Like “environmentalists for big oil” or “Americans who really love telecom monopolies.” These groups then help big companies create a sound-wall of illusory support for policies that generally aren’t popular, or great for innovation or markets.

Case in point: this week both Politico and CNBC released stories showcasing how Amazon and Google had been funding a “small business alliance” that appears to be partially or entirely contrived. The group, the Connected Commerce Council, professes to represent small U.S. businesses, yet has been busy recently lobbying government to avoid antitrust reform (which would, generally, aid small businesses).

When Politico reached out to companies listed as members of the organization, most of them had mysteriously never heard of it, and were greatly annoyed their company names were being used for such a purpose:

The four-year-old group listed about 5,000 small businesses in its membership directory before it removed that document from its website late last month. When POLITICO contacted 70 of those businesses, 61 said they were not members of the group and many added that they were not familiar with the organization.

Of course, this is classic astroturfing, a favorite K Street policy shop tactic. Telecom has used this practice for years, employing all manner of suspect organizations (often claiming to represent minorities, consumers, small businesses, or even cattlemen associations) to support things their purported constituents would never really support if they understood what was going on (more mergers, less competition, fewer consumer protections, whatever).

A particularly pernicious tactic involves the creation or “co-opting” of civil rights groups, who’ll support whatever shitty policy a telecom giant will want in exchange for, say, some funding for an events center. If an existing organization can’t be compromised, often telecoms will just create brand new ones. Sometimes the organizations started out as real, but just as often they’re completely fabrications.

The websites for such organizations almost always feature lots of stock photos of minorities, and the organizations spend a lot of time seeding op-ed in papers around the country to influence the discourse. The goal, again, is to create the illusion of broad, diverse opposition to something that actually has broad public (and small business) support: like, say, reining in monopolistic behavior.

That’s of course not to say there aren’t small businesses actively concerned that overly broad antitrust reform couldn’t harm small businesses. Especially given DC’s recent definition of antitrust reform has been decidedly half-assed. But real anti-monopoly groups make it very clear when talking to Politico that legitimate grievance wasn’t what the group was up to:

Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the anti-monopoly group the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, called 3C’s use of the businesses’ names “stunning.” Mitchell’s group helps mobilize small businesses in favor of regulating the major tech companies, most prominently Amazon. “It’s apparent that Amazon and Google think they can take whatever they want from small business owners, including using their names for their own lobbying agenda,” Mitchell said.

Unsurprisingly, neither Amazon nor Google wanted to talk about whether a PR firm they hired hijacked the names of small businesses for PR and lobbying purposes without those companies’ explicit permission — a pretty good sign the report is accurate.

In the late 00s, as “big tech” was just getting its lobbying footing, it generally avoided these kinds of unethical tactics. But as tech giants sought greater influence in DC, they quickly hired all the old hands from other industries that had been doing this kind of stuff for decades. Now, things are different (as made fairly clear by this week’s big story about Meta hiring firms to smear TikTok).

One amusing bit. Ken Buck, who has never really seen a shitty telecom monopoly policy he hasn’t supported and who knows the telecom sector has been doing this kind of stuff for decades, engages in some light face fanning that “big tech” could sink to such a level:

When asked about 3C’s representation of their membership, Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, the top Republican on the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, said, “The fact that Big Tech’s so-called grassroots support is fraudulent doesn’t surprise me.”

“This news is one more brick in the wall of a lobbying campaign that would have embarrassed Big Tobacco in its heyday,” added Buck, who is sponsoring legislation that would crack down on the tech giants’ power over the economy.

Whichever industry or company is doing it, it’s gross and sleazy. But despite these kinds of stories popping up occasionally, there’s never really any meaningful punishment or accountability for it. It’s generally too complicated of a concept for the public to get too upset by, or for media outlets to spend too much time discussing (after all, there are false stories about TikTok causing Tourette to cover).

And since these organizations can be easily pooped out of a factory by a K Street firm for a few thousand bucks, by the time an organization is exposed as a fabrication, they’re already busy building the next one.

Filed Under: astroturf, big tech, fake news, lobbying, propaganda, silicon valley, telecom
Companies: amazon, connected commerce council, google