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Google Brussels Office: Worrying Firepower
Photo: GEORGES GOBET / AFP
For platform operators, software and hardware providers, chip manufacturers and mobile network operators, the European Union is not just an important marketplace with hundreds of millions of potential customers.
It is also perhaps the greatest regulatory danger zone for the technology industry - access to decision-makers is correspondingly contested.
Even the struggle for the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was seen as a lobbying battle that the rapporteur of the EU Parliament at the time, Jan Philipp Albrecht, had "never experienced".
The laws on digital services and digital markets (DAS and DMA) planned by the EU Commission are likely to be even more competitive.
No other industry - be it pharmaceuticals, finance, fossil energies or chemicals - spends as much money on lobbying at the EU level as "Big Tech".
With 1,452 registered lobbyists, it was most recently 97 million euros a year.
This is what the Lobbycontrol organization determined on the basis of the EU transparency register.
The figures in it are not always completely up-to-date or complete, but they come from the companies and associations themselves, so they are certainly not exaggerated.
At the top are mainly US companies, first and foremost Google with 5.75 million euros per year, followed by Facebook with 5.5 million, Microsoft with 5.25 million and Apple with 3.5 million.
Huawei, Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM and Vodafone have also spent seven-digit sums on lobbying.
These ten companies together come to 32.75 million euros, almost twice as much as the ten chemical groups with the highest expenditure on lobbying and more than three times as much as the top ten car manufacturers spend.
The millions are spent on staff, events, office rentals, support for think tanks and for assignments to consulting agencies.
The latter makes up almost a quarter of the total on Google.
Unevenly distributed meetings with decision-makers
Overall, one in five companies in Lobbycontrol's list has its headquarters in the USA.
In no other country are they more.
After all, 14 percent of the companies are based in Germany.
Less than one percent comes from China or Hong Kong.
The companies do not only use their own staff to gain access to the representatives of the Commission, Parliament and Council.
They also commission various consulting agencies and are organized in several associations, such as DigitalEurope.
According to lobby control, the association has an annual budget of 1.25 million euros and represents the interests of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Huawei, SAP and Zoom, among others.
The German industry association Bitkom also has an office in Brussels with an annual budget in the six-figure range.
The effort reflects the growing social importance of the sector, according to the lobby control report published on Tuesday, which SPIEGEL was able to see in advance.
It is "worrying that the platforms can use their firepower to ensure that their voices in the debate about new rules are heard across the opposing and critical voices."
The consequence of the imbalance: of all 270 documented meetings between the EU Commission and stakeholders on the topics of DAS and DMA, three quarters took place with industry, less than a quarter with consumer advocates, trade unions or civil rights organizations.
Most of the individual meetings were again held by Google, followed by Facebook, which is at least level with the European consumer association BEUC.
Among other things, lobby control calls for the expansion of the transparency register, stricter disclosure obligations of think tanks to their donors and, above all, more evenly distributed hearings of interest representatives by the Commission and Parliament - including a restriction on the industrial side as soon as an imbalance is reached.
