The Internet Association, the lobby group that Big Tech used to lobby and be their voice before US authorities in Washington, will close when this year ends, after nine years of activity. The cessation of its operations comes, according to Ars Technica, after some of the companies that were part of it, such as Uber or Microsoft, decide no longer provide financial support to the association. Microsoft had also decided to abandon it, regardless of whether it went ahead or not.
This closure is one more example of the differences, each time greater, between the objectives of the technological ones, with Microsoft increasingly wanting to mark distance with respect to them, and without seeing any advantages of belonging to the AI, to which it seems it contributed between $ 800,000 and $ 1 million each year. Other smaller tech companies in the association were also increasingly frustrated, as their priorities collided with those of the big ones, and were not taken sufficiently into account.
Microsoft has lagged behind Amazon and Google in lobbying investment. Amazon has been the most active technology company in this, since in the first nine months of the year it has invested 15.3 million dollars. Google has invested nine million in the same period, while Microsoft has spent 7.8 million. Mind you, these figures don’t include your contributions to groups like the Internet Association.
At the same time, the big technology companies are displeased that the authorities are not acting against Microsoft on matters related to the monopoly. And that worries them, and even annoys them, because they believe that the company is not being looked at with a magnifying glass, or at least not as much as other rivals. In this sense, the most affected companies are Amazon and Google, which if they continue with the current level of vigilance, would be at a disadvantage compared to Microsoft in 2022 for everything related to purchases and mergers.
This anger even leads them to call for action against Microsoft in Europe. This has been done by a group representing the cloud computing industry backed by Amazon, which alleges that those in Redmond are signing anti-competitive license agreements in the enterprise software industry. The group, known as Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers, assures that the Law of Digital Markets, proposed by the EU, would be a “historical error” if it leaves out the software providers.
