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Amazon, Google Busted Faking Small Business Opposition to Antitrust Reform

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 07 2022, @11:11AM   

upstart writes:

Amazon, Google Busted Faking Small Business Opposition To Antitrust Reform:

For decades now, a favorite DC lobbying tactic has been to create bogus groups pretending to support something unpopular your company is doing. Like "environmentalists for big oil" or "Americans who really love telecom monopolies." These groups then help big companies create a sound-wall of illusory support for policies that generally aren't popular, or great for innovation or markets.

Case in point: this week both Politico and CNBC released stories showcasing how Amazon and Google had been funding a "small business alliance" that appears to be partially or entirely contrived. The group, the Connected Commerce Council, professes to represent small U.S. businesses, yet has been busy recently lobbying government to avoid antitrust reform (which would, generally, aid small businesses).

When Politico reached out to companies listed as members of the organization, most of them had mysteriously never heard of it, and were greatly annoyed their company names were being used for such a purpose:

The four-year-old group listed about 5,000 small businesses in its membership directory before it removed that document from its website late last month. When POLITICO contacted 70 of those businesses, 61 said they were not members of the group and many added that they were not familiar with the organization.

Google is not your friend!

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Original Submission

• Don't worry, nobody believed them Don't worry, nobody believed them (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday April 07 2022, @11:45AM (1 child)

  by Thexalon (636) on Thursday April 07 2022, @11:45AM (#1235440)

  The purpose of these sorts of efforts isn't really to be credible, nobody with a brain thinks they are. The purpose is to provide the politicians with political cover while they do what they were bribed lobbied to do, so if any of those pesky constituents or reporters asks them about it they can say "I did what I did at the urging of the Connected Commerce Council, a group of small businesses who benefit from keeping things as they are." And that's how even though astroturfing groups like this are full of crap, everybody knows it, and everybody knows that everybody knows it, they still succeed in their purpose of helping their funders get what they want.

  --
  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.

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• Re:Don't worry, nobody believed them (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @12:24PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @12:24PM (#1235443)

  Yes and they can also make it look like unpopular issues have a second side. It's like smoking or climate change which are extremely one sided issues when it comes to the actual research that's been done, but the relevant industries can buy time by muddying the water.

  Genetic engineering is another good example where they lie their asses off about regular cross breeding being similar to transgenics and now when less problematic methods come along, there's no way of cleanly distinguishing a reasonable boundary line.

  Parent