Lew, clearly Mordor on the Potomac is angry that Apple is not spending more on lobbying and not vying for gummint contracts (I haven’t been in DC in years, but I suspect the sign of having arrived as an important bureaucrat is getting a gummint-issued Blackberry), providing crummy products and lousy services for too much taxpayer (and borrowed Chinese) cash. As opposed to making things that actually work. DC loves to target businesses that don’t play nice — corporations and privately owned firms that don’t engage in corporatism — and now clearly Apple is in its sights:
Compared with other tech giants, Apple’s lobbying expenditures are small. In 2009, Apple spent only $1.5 million to lobby the federal government, less than Amazon, Yahoo and IBM. In 2009, Google, for example, spent $4 million, Microsoft $7 million and AT&T $15 million.
In the first quarter of this year, Apple spent $560,000 on lobbying, according to disclosure reports. During the same period, Google spent $1.4 million and Microsoft spent $1.7 million.
On a related note, I often hear people who are suspicious of Google, of giving that company too much information and what Google might do with it (privacy! privacy!), but those same people don’t seem to care how much information the gummint has, and what they will do with it.
4:37 pm on June 14, 2010
