“Apple is taking a bruising in Washington, and insiders say there’s a reason: It’s the one place in the world where the company hasn’t built its brand,” David Saleh Rauf and Jonathan Allen write for Politico.
“In the first three months of this year, Google and Microsoft spent a little more than $7 million on lobbying and related federal activities combined,” Rauf and Allen write. “Apple spent $500,000 — even less than it spent the year before… Unlike Facebook, Google and Microsoft, Apple has no political action committee. And while Google and Microsoft have aggressive news media operations in Washington, Apple doesn’t. That standoffish approach to D.C. may have worked fine in the Steve Jobs era, but the charismatic leader’s death last year left Apple without its reality distortion field.”
Rauf and Allen write, “The company’s attitude toward D.C. — described by critics as ‘don’t bother us’ — has left it without many inside-the-Beltway friends. And that means Apple is mostly on its own when the Justice Department goes after it on e-books, when members of Congress attack it over its overseas tax avoidance or when an alphabet soup of regulators examine its business practices. ‘I never once had a meeting with anybody representing Apple,’ said Jeff Miller, who served as a senior aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee for eight years. ‘There have been other tech companies who chose not to engage in Washington, and for the most part that strategy did not benefit them.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Translation: Grease those greedy D.C. palms and life will get easier for you, Apple.
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