Tech's Lobbying Push Follows Market Consolidation, Study Shows

The flood of lobbying dollars spent by tech companies has increased with market concentration, according to a new study that cites similar patterns in the pharmaceutical and oil industries. Bloomberg: The report suggests that entrenched firms face less competition and don't have to invest as much in innovation, giving them more resources to spend influencing the democratic process. Reed Showalter, an attorney with the anti-monopolist group American Economic Liberties Project who wrote the study, said policy makers and antitrust enforcers should look beyond the impact that mergers have on consumers and consider how market concentration affects the democratic process. "We need to more closely scrutinize various elements of competition policy that have allowed industries to become more concentrated over the last 30 to 40 years," Showalter said in a phone interview Tuesday. "Allowing unchecked concentration is the cause for a lot of the democratic harms that we're also seeing people complain about as big money enters politics. There's no coincidence there."

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