The Internet Association, whose members include Google and Facebook, lists policy priorities like supporting encryption in open letter to President-elect Trump
Here's what 40 internet companies want Trump to do — The Internet Association, whose members include the likes of Amazon …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Internet Association's open letter caps a year in which the trade group was already staking out contested positions on behalf of its members — it had endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership in March despite opposition from more than 250 other tech firms (that TPP endorsement). Writing to President-elect Trump before he takes office is a bid to set the agenda early rather than react to it.
The letter also previews the group's posture for the entire first year of the administration: within months it would tell FCC chairman Ajit Pai to keep the Obama-era net neutrality rules (its letter to Pai), and by September its members would jointly press Trump to preserve DACA (the DACA appeal).
First-order effects
- Google, Facebook, Amazon and the rest of the 40 signatory companies put encryption support and their shared policy priorities formally on record with the incoming administration, establishing a single coordinated lobbying front instead of company-by-company appeals.
- Trump enters office with a defined list of internet-industry asks from the sector's main trade group, making encryption one of the first named points of potential friction between Silicon Valley and the new White House.
Second-order effects
- The open-letter format becomes the group's repeat playbook: the same coalition mechanism reappears in the net neutrality fight with the FCC and the collective DACA letter signed by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
- By speaking through one association, members blunt the risk of being picked off individually — a rival firm breaking ranks on encryption or neutrality would now be visibly diverging from a stated group position.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Internet Association functions less as an occasional endorser (as with TPP) and more as a standing counterweight to an administration whose regulatory agenda — from Pai's FCC to immigration policy — cuts against member interests, institutionalizing tech-versus-Washington friction for the term.
- Encryption emerges as a durable line the industry will defend collectively regardless of which party holds power, since the same group kept issuing joint positions across the transition and into 2018, when it launched its industry-diversity campaign.
The trend: The largest internet companies are consolidating their Washington influence operations into a single trade-group voice, using coordinated public letters to contest an administration whose positions on encryption, net neutrality and immigration diverge from theirs.