...2000 election, those PACs gave $7.1m to politicians, a total that rose to $8.6m by the next presidential-election cycle, four years later.
In 1998, only 12 companies in this category — including HP, Microsoft, Intel and Oracle, along with the telecommunications and cable companies — had created PACs. Since that time, PACs have been formed by Amazon.com, Dell, Yahoo, Cisco, Electronic Arts, Sun and RSA.
The new lobbying efforts have already paid off on some high-profile issues, such as the argument that Internet providers should not open a "fast lane" that would favour some Web sites over others. E-commerce and Internet companies such as Amazon, eBay, Google and Microsoft have been lobbying to give the Federal Communications Commission power to enforce such neutrality.
"Google's mission is to organise the world's information, and our mission in Washington is to keep the Internet a free and open place for our users to get information," said Alan Davidson, Google's first staff lobbyist. "So everything kind of flows from that."
Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, introduced a bill on 2 March that would grant the FCC this authority. Wyden and his corporate allies say the measure is necessary because executives at Verizon, BellSouth and the newly merged AT&T and SBC Communications have talked about the desirability of a two-tiered Internet.
"They're going on the offensive in a major way," said Adam Thierer, an analyst at the Progress & Freedom Foundation and the author of a book on telecommunications regulation. "They're aggressively and pre-emptively asking for prophylactic regulations from the FCC. No matter how you cut it, it's an offensive effort."
The beginnings of another offensive took place in 2004, when Intel, Sun, Gateway, Royal Philips Electronics and other tech firms announced their support for a bill that antagonised the recording industry. The measure would have let the Federal Trade Commission punish record labels for selling music CDs with copy-restriction technology that violated government regulations.
Historically, Silicon Valley's attempts to influence politicians have been defensive in nature — almost libertarian-leaning — and aimed at opposing laws or regulations viewed as intrusive.
America Online and Microsoft bankrolled part of the lawsuit to defeat the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Also that year, California tech firms joined together to oppose a state ballot measure, Proposition 211, that was designed to make it easier for shareholder lawsuits to succeed, even if there was no evidence of corporate fraud.
But TJ Rodgers, the Ayn Rand-quoting chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor in San Jose, California, issued a stern admonishment of involvement in Washington politics in a 1998 speech: "Silicon Valley is not very good at the pork barrel game. Statist companies have refined their lobbying skills for decades. We cannot, and do not want to, win at their game."
Tim Draper, a venture capitalist who's the managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, offered similar advice at the time in a Wall Street Journal article titled Silicon Valley to Washington: Ignore Us, Please. He wrote, "We ought to count our blessings that most of our industry is 2,500 miles from Washington and that most bureaucrats either fear, don't care about or don't understand technology."
The apotheosis of this leave-us-alone attitude came with the creation of Americans for Computer Privacy in 1998. The coalition was an effort to oppose federal restrictions on the overseas sales of encryption software and hardware, which had bedevilled tech firms for the better part of the decade.
In a rare political moment not seen since, America Online, Compaq, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and some 90 other companies joined with advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association and Phyllis Schlafly's conservative Eagle Forum. The script for one of the group's television ads featured a husband and wife wondering, "Should we trust...
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