Google, Amazon.com, eBay, Facebook and
other Internet companies have formed a lobbying group called The
Internet Association to tackle regulatory and political issues in
Washington, D.C., and it is due to kick off on Wednesday.
It will
lobby on issues such as allocation of visas for engineers and matters of
privacy and piracy, said the group's president Michael Beckerman, a
former advisor to Fred Upton, the chairman of the U.S. House of
Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee.
Other members include Expedia , LinkedIn , Monster Worldwide , Yahoo! and Zynga .
Formation
of the group marks a stronger alliance of Internet companies as they
try to influence regulations pertaining to revenue repatriation, cyber
security, and sales tax.
"It is the Internet's decentralized and
open model that has unleashed unprecedented entrepreneurialism," said
Beckerman. "Policymakers must understand that the preservation of that
freedom is essential to the vitality of the Internet itself and the
resulting economic prosperity."
Google and Facebook are among the
companies that have been steadily ramping up spending on lobbying the
federal government. Older tech companies, like Microsoft , have long been active in Washington.
Google,
which is being investigated by antitrust regulators in the United
States and Europe, has lobbied officials at the Federal Trade
Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of
Commerce, according to disclosure forms.
Facebook has lobbied
regarding online privacy and immigration reform while also talking to
lawmakers and their staffs about matters concerning initial public
offerings.
In May, Facebook became the first U.S. company to go
public with a market valuation above $100 billion. Its market debut was
marred by technological problems on the NASDAQ exchange and criticism
that the IPO was priced too high.
Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012