It’s easy and common for people to say “corporate lobbyists write the legislation and control the government,” but in a recent argument, I found it much harder to actually back that up. Do companies just throw money at the government and legislators? Do companies influence the lawmaking process, or just political parties? Do companies actually write the wording in the law, or just influence issues? So I did a bit of research. I want to focus on the U.S. since they have a lot of influence on the rest of the world (particularly in my area of interest, IP law). Here is a good starter article.

There is lots of other stuff that goes on, such as campaign donations and so on, but this gives a pretty good summary of how a large company might get laws written. It suggests that it isn’t anywhere near as “obvious” as throwing money at Congress and telling them to write laws. Lobbyists are essentially full-time assistants to lawmakers, on the payroll of corporate interests. Basically, Congress staff have access to a wealth of assistants who have much more in-depth knowledge of the specific domain they are working in. Need to write a law about copyright enforcement? Don’t know the details? No worries: A friendly man from the MPAA knows a lot about copyright law, and he’s here to help.

The point of the article is that the lawmakers aren’t motivated by greed (“if I write this law, they will give me moneys”). They are motivated by laziness (“if I let them research and write this law, I won’t have to”).

But it doesn’t seem so bad to have people merely helping shape the laws. Why should we be worried if the MPAA sends a few guys to offer helpful suggestions to congress? Well a handy site, the OpenSecrets Lobbying Spending Database shows us the true magnitude of the problem, within the United States. In 2010, a total of $3.51 billion was spent on lobbying Congress and federal agencies (note that this does not include campaign contributions). That paid for 12,951 lobbyists that year. Imagine a country where nearly 13 thousand of the people whose sole job is to help write laws are on the payroll of non-government corporations! You begin to see what people mean when they say “corporations run the United States”.

The biggest spending comes from pharmaceutical companies. In technology, the two biggest spenders in 2010 were Microsoft ($6.9 million) and HP ($6.8 million), followed by Google. In 2011 so far, Google are the biggest tech lobbyist! Interestingly, we hear a lot about the lobbying by the RIAA and MPAA but they only spent $5.5 million and $1.6 million, respectively, in 2010. They must be getting a lot of value for their lobbying dollar!