Alphabet spends about 50-75% more than Verizon or Comcast on lobbying. Which is amazing considering they’re not in a regulated industry. When you’re in a regulated industry, regulators micro-manage your business so there is a lot of lobbying involved dealing with relatively mundane and uncontroversial things. Not big picture stuff, but like cities vetoing fiber nodes because they’re ugly. Tech companies don’t deal with that, so it’s amazing they manage to spend more.

Could the fact that they spend so much on lobbying be one of the reasons their industry is still unregulated?

Is the Pope catholic?

Google does have Fiber though I imagine the extent of that is still much lower than a full Telecoms company. I think the exceptional spending on lobbying comes from the sheer breadth of services that Google provides:

> "Google said it lobbied on dozens of issues, reflecting how integral its services have become to American lives and commerce. The filing cited privacy, data security, antitrust, taxes, tariffs, trade, the opioid crisis, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, immigration, the future of work, encryption and national security."

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/google-se....

> Tech companies don’t deal with that, so it’s amazing they manage to spend more.

It's not really that surprising, because they're not only affected by it but on multiple fronts.

There was a time when Google spent hardly anything on lobbying. Meanwhile Hollywood was promoting things like SOPA, Microsoft was at one point operating a major anti-Google lobbying campaign, ISPs want to violate network neutrality, etc.

It's one thing to not want to fight, something else to not respond when provoked.

IMO, that is not the point. Lobby spending can be more indicative of a looming regulatory threat than to protect monopolies that harm consumers.

I also think that Warren is dead wrong. The internet/FB/GOOGL allow smaller businesses to flourish. 15 years ago, only major brands could afford to advertise or reach an audience, now niche companies can exist with a national or international presence.

If anything, these tech monopolies hurt the previously established, Coke/Kraft/Sears and they hurt VC's who can't find a way to scale a niche brand with smaller TAM's or compete directly with Amazon, etc.

No doubt the internet itself has created new opportunities for small businesses, but why do you say that huge companies like Facebook and Google needed to accumulate market power to achieve that?