Study: lobbying dollars spent by US tech companies have increased with market concentration; the pattern is similar to pharmaceutical and oil & gas industries
- Pattern is similar to pharma and oil and gas industries — Study says antitrust laws should consider impact on democracy Source: American Economic Liberties Project .
What the study adds is the correlation: spending has climbed alongside market concentration, tracing the same arc as pharma and oil & gas. Its recommendation that antitrust law weigh impacts on democracy reframes lobbying not as a cost of doing business but as a symptom regulators should measure.
First-order effects
Big Tech's lobbying budgets keep setting records even as individual strategies diverge — Amazon hit a record $20.3M and Meta $20.1M in 2021 federal lobbying, while Google rose 27% and Apple cut back to $6.5M — meaning the biggest concentrated firms are also the heaviest spenders.
Second-order effects
When antitrust bills surfaced for the omnibus spending package, Meta, Amazon, and trade group CCIA ramped up opposition — exactly the defensive deployment the study predicts concentrated markets produce.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft more than doubled their declared EU lobbying within six years (~$8.3M in 2014 to ~$23M in H1 2020 alone), showing the Washington playbook exporting to Brussels as regulators there tighten too.
Third-order effects
If the tech-pharma-oil & gas pattern holds, market concentration and political influence compound each other: dominant firms can afford escalating lobbying that raises barriers for challengers and softens the antitrust response to dominance itself.
Adopting the study's framing would push antitrust enforcement beyond consumer prices toward measuring how much a merger or monopoly distorts the legislative process — a structural shift in what regulators treat as harm.
The trend: As US tech markets concentrate, lobbying is hardening into a fixed cost of scale, following the same concentration-spends-more curve long seen in pharma and oil & gas.
“There is no world in which concentration exclusively produces consumer harms,” @reed_showalter said. “It produces citizen harms.” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
1. A major new study by @reed_showalter shows that monopolization likely drives political corruption. When industry concentration goes up, lobbying spend goes up. When it goes down, lobbying spend goes down. The link is eery. https://www.economicliberties.us/ ... https://twitter.…
2/ Showalter's research analyzes economic concentration & lobbyist spending of three industries: 💻internet companies 💊pharmaceuticals 🛢oil & gas And it finds proof that economic concentration trends can predict lobbying spend in the years that follow industry consolidation.
Concentrated markets are not only bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for innovation. They are bad for our democracy. New statistical research out today from Economic Liberties' Fellow @reed_showalter shows how and why. 🧵👇
3/ What does that mean? Simply put: dominant corporations are not content to just gobble up & abuse their competitors — once dominant, they'll use their power to buy control over your government, too.
As Fellow @reed_showalter tells @annaedge4 at @business, “There is no world in which concentration exclusively produces consumer harms. It produces citizen harms.” 🔥 https://www.bloomberg.com/...
4. Modern economists and antitrust establishment lawyers shy away from the very clear political goals of the antitrust laws, using the shield of ‘consumer welfare’ to frame the statutes as merely technocratic and about resource allocation. But of course, that's nonsense.
2. The lesson from the paper is intuitive and obvious, but hadn't been proved before. “The bigger companies get, the more powerful they become.” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
3. @reed_showalter followed three different industries. Tech, oil and gas, and pharmaceuticals. He found a four year lag on lobbying spend linked to concentration. Basically when executives have to compete they focus on competing. When they have a monopoly they focus on politics.…