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combined lobbying power exceeded that of AT&T (Schiller 1981). Even
then, AT&T almost sidestepped the move to competition when its lobby-
ists convinced a near majority in Congress to support legislation cement-
ing Bell's monopoly. But that move fell a few votes short and when the
Department of Defense recognized that lobbyists representing major users
would win the day, it withdrew support for the monopoly, opening the
door to market competition.
In spite of this and many other models of lobbying power, the burgeon-
ing IT industry of the 1990s chose to maintain the bare minimum of a
lobbying presence in Washington. As one account described, “Until the
mid-1990's, politics was a foreign subject to executives at most technol-
ogy companies—just as software, hardware and the Internet were foreign
concepts to most members of Congress” (Rivlin 2004). A business user
explained, “There was benign neglect on both sides, Washington and
Silicon Valley. The valley generally took the attitude, 'As long as they
ain't in my face, just ignore them'” (ibid.). What contact existed mainly
took the form of politicians making the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley for a
generous sprinkling of the gold dust that turned politicians into vision-
aries. This view began to subside once the new century arrived and the
dot-com bust rocked the industry. First, since they no longer had the
Midas touch, Silicon Valley lobbyists had to line up along with those from
other industries and make sure to bring their checkbooks. Politicians,
many of whom lost a lot of money in the crash, were no longer there just
for a photo op. As one lobbyist for the IT industry said in a 2004 article,
“Back in the late 1990's, Silicon Valley assumed that all they had to do is
show up and politicians would fall at their feet, and for a while they were
right. Now it takes a checkbook to get that meeting” (ibid.). Second, the
policy issues that seemed low on the priority list when IT executives were
rolling in venture capital, like tax rules on stock options and visa programs
for foreign workers, now grew in signiicance.
Although lobbying grew in the wake of the downturn and especially
when social media and cloud computing started new waves of IT expan-
sion, it did not really pick up steam until social media and the cloud began
to raise signiicant concerns, including the need to promote government's
use of cloud services. While other issues might attract more press attention,
cloud companies' success in getting the U.S. government, both civilian and
military, to fully commit to shifting services to the cloud has been one of
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