Zachary Rodgers offers some analysis of Google’s new Washington D.C. lobbying office in the article: The Search Engine’s Lobbyist.
Some companies do their own lobbying. Among enormous bubble-era start-ups, Google is actually late to the table. Yahoo!, eBay, America Online (through Time Warner) and MSN (through Microsoft) all have people in Washington. Naturally, not all these staffers work full-time to influence policy…Especially interesting for Google is that they’re getting into businesses where the legislation is sketchy at best,” said Stein. “They could clearly go the wrong way in Google’s mind. It certainly makes sense for them to keep participating in the same way that GM is there thinking about mileage per gallon for SUVs.”
We first blogged about Google’s intentions to open a D.C. office about 11 days ago.