Jack Shafer brought to my attention this terrific new Politico column by Michael Kinsley entitled, “How Microsoft Learned ABCs of D.C.” In the editorial, Kinsley touches on some of the same themes I addressed in my recent piece here “On Facebook ‘Normalizing Relations’ with Washington” as well as in my Cato Institute essay from last year on”The Sad State of Cyber-Politics.” Kinsley notes how Microsoft was originally bashed by many for not getting into the D.C. lobbying game early enough:
there even was a feeling that, in refusing to play the Washington game, Microsoft was being downright unpatriotic. Look, buddy, there is an American way of doing things, and that American way includes hiring lobbyists, paying lawyers vast sums by the hour, throwing lavish parties for politicians, aides, journalists and so on. So get with the program.
But after doing exactly that, Kinsley notes, the company got blasted for for being too aggressive in D.C.!
So that’s what Microsoft did. It moved its “government affairs” office out of distant Chevy Chase and into the downtown K Street corridor. It bulked up on lawyers and hired the best-connected lobbyists. Soon, Microsoft was coming under criticism for being heavy-handed in its attempts to buy influence.
“But the sad thing is that it seems to have worked. Microsoft is no longer Public Enemy No. 1,” Kinsley notes, and he continues on to reiterate a point I made in my last two essays: Google is the Great Satan now!
Best of all, the finger of blame has moved on — to Google, which now gets the blame for everything. It is an evil monopoly that uses its monopoly power to extend that monopoly into new areas. It must be stopped before all of its competitors are wiped out. And so on. This is all very familiar to anyone who worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s and (it must be admitted) very enjoyable. Microsoft last week piled on, bringing charges against Google before the European Union (which had given Microsoft an especially hard time), accusing it of a variety of nefarious practices, including some the EU had formerly accused Microsoft of.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.