High-tech gigantic enterprises such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. are casting a record huge amount on lobbying activities

In the United States, there is a lobby disclosure law that obliges companies that spend a large amount of money on lobbying activities to disclose information, considering the importance of lobbying and the magnitude of their impact on the public as a whole. The lobbying expenses for 2018 high-tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and others were disclosed simultaneously, and Google, which was top spending 21.2 million dollars (about 2.3 billion yen), recorded an 18% increase from the previous year It is clear that actual lobbying expenses are being recorded.

Google, Amazon, and Facebook all spent record amount last year lobbying the US government - Recode
https://www.recode.net/2019/1/23/18194328/google-amazon-facebook-lobby-record

Graph of the lobbying expenses for 2018 of major American high-tech enterprises is as follows. Compared to Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, you can see that Google is at a breakthrough.

Google has invested 21.2 million dollars (about 2.3 billion yen), the highest ever in 2018. In addition to the projected amount, it is up 18% since 2017, and you can see well that Google is focusing on lobbying.

Since 2013, Amazon also increases lobbying expenses on the right.

Facebook, which was pursued severely by the Cambridge Analytika incident as a result of fraudulent use of data, is also enthusiastic about lobbying and up by 10% over the previous year.

Microsoft constantly spends around 10 million dollars (about 1.1 billion yen).

Apple's lobbying expenses are 6.6 million dollars (about 730 million yen), which is modest compared to other high-tech major players.

In recent years, handling of personal information of users online has been tightened to protect the privacy rights, but this movement welcomes high-tech enterprises such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. that earn huge profits by utilizing user data It is not possible. Because the profit obtained by lobbying expenses of tens of millions of dollars (billions of yen) is billions of dollars (hundreds of billions of yen), the lobbying expenses may be cheap for high-tech giants.