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maintain, turns irms known for their inventions, innovations, and entre-
preneurship into ordinary companies that would rather focus on inluenc-
ing Washington to protect what they have than on developing “the next
new thing.” One business publication harkened back to a 1999 speech
by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who referred to
lobbying as the IT industry's “suicide impulse” (Crovitz 2013). When
Google lobbied the Federal Trade Commission—successfully, it turns
out—to forestall an antitrust investigation, the commission's chairman
questioned the lobbying strategy: “Stop! Invest your money in expansion
and innovation. Google's lobbying expenses had no effect on the care,
diligence or analysis of the agency's incredibly hard-working staff or the
decisions reached by any of the FTC's ive commissioners” (ibid.). But
even if its lobbying was successful, there is still an argument to be made
that lobbying distracts companies from their core mission. “Instead of the
'suicide impulse' of lobbying for more regulation,” one analyst concluded,
“Silicon Valley should seek deregulation and a long-overdue freedom
to return to its entrepreneurial roots” (ibid.). These observations are
understandable. Did Facebook really need thirty-eight lobbyists in 2013,
an increase of ifteen over 2011? Do Apple, Google, and Microsoft really
need to pad their high-paid ranks with former FTC staffers? Is this not
“spinning the revolving door that fuels the growth of lobbying” (ibid.)?
And what about Amazon, whose owner appeared to trump his lobbying
competitors by purchasing the primary newspaper in the American capital,
thereby giving him, and presumably his company, privileged access to the
corridors of power (Cassidy 2013)?
Well founded as they are, these criticisms also reveal a simplistic view
of government as a completely negative inluence on business, especially
in new industries, such as those that took root in Silicon Valley starting
in the 1950s. It is simplistic because, while government can slow the
growth of innovation through excessive regulation, it is also the case that
businesses have historically depended on government for infrastructure
support, for maintaining a stable intellectual-property environment, and
for a market in the early days of experimentation. Government was all
of these things for Silicon Valley and it is reasonable to maintain that
Silicon Valley would not have succeeded without government support
(Mazzucato 2013). This is not just because government funded early
research on information technology through its own research labs such
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