For tech companies, the new relationships are the subject of serious friction and scorn. Tech ops tick off Valley liberals

Silicon Valley’s power players have learned that Washington can be a political asset — and a cultural hazard.

Google, Facebook and other tech giants have been spending furiously inside the Beltway as they seek sweeping changes to the country’s patent, privacy and immigration laws. But as these companies angle to improve their political fortunes, they’ve also backed candidates and causes that are at odds with the beliefs of the larger tech community back home — and the industry has faced plenty of criticism as a result.


When Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo tried to cozy up to conservative state legislators, for example, they found themselves on the defensive for supporting an organization that had opposed renewable-energy laws — a major issue for the environmentally conscious tech crowd. As Facebook specifically aimed to donate to a wider array of political candidates, it found itself writing checks to state attorneys general who had been fighting gay marriage, despite the company’s longtime public support for the cause.

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For well-established Washington insiders, these strange bedfellows are merely the price of doing business. But for tech companies, still learning to navigate politics, the new relationships are the subject of serious friction and scorn.

“As some of these tech companies got large enough that they started opening D.C. offices, they brought in D.C. teams, which makes a lot of sense. And in a lot of ways, those D.C. teams did business as usual,” said Julie Samuels, the executive director of Engine, which represents startup companies.

“But that way of typically operating on Capitol Hill doesn’t always jibe with the ways these tech companies operate in the Bay Area or New York, wherever they’re based,” she continued. “So I actually think, in a lot of these cases, the companies’ headquarters may not have realized everything that was going on in D.C.”

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Tech giants erected their D.C. outposts as their business needs dictated. For Microsoft, then Google, the spark was a government antitrust investigation; for others, like Facebook, it was the specter of new privacy restrictions. A bruising but successful 2011 congressional battle over a controversial copyright bill — the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA — spurred scores of smaller startups to engage the city as well.

But the industry’s heightened investments at times have ignited controversy, as many companies learned last month from their association with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

For years, tech’s biggest names steadily signed up as members of the conservative-leaning group, whose other backers include about 150 state legislators and corporate heavyweights like Comcast and ExxonMobil. One of ALEC’s key functions is to produce model legislation for state capitals — and some Web giants seized on that opportunity. Yelp, for example, worked to advance bills that spare online reviewers from lawsuits.

Yet ALEC’s interests span more than technology. The group historically has fought renewable-energy mandates and advocated for stand-your-ground gun laws. The conservative leanings long have drawn the scorn of major labor unions like the AFL-CIO and liberal activists like Common Cause.

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Those groups recently seized on the divide — Silicon Valley invests in clean energy — and demanded that Google, Facebook and others leave. Microsoft peeled off first, partly because of shareholder and budget pressures. Google next found itself in the cross hairs, months after liberal activists rallied at a so-called #dontfundevil protest held outside the company’s May shareholder meeting. Asked later in October about Google’s longtime support for ALEC, given the group’s well-known position on renewable energy, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt seethed during an interview on NPR. “They’re just literally lying,” he said about ALEC’s approach to climate change.

Google withdrew from ALEC just days later. The company had been a member since 2011, though the search giant repeatedly failed to reveal the relationship on its political transparency website until December 2013. Yelp and Yahoo soon followed suit, while Facebook said it would reconsider its stance at the end of the year. Ebay remains a member — a fact that led one liberal climate group, Forecast the Facts, to press CEO John Donahoe during an event in Silicon Valley this week. A spokeswoman said eBay reviews its ALEC “membership on an annual basis and will do so again shortly for 2015.”

ALEC opponents still believe they’ve scored a major victory. “The fossil fuel industry, the Exxons and BPs and the others, they’re used to being criticized for being old economy, the way of the past, for polluting the environment,” said Miles Rapoport, the president of Common Cause, in an interview. “The tech companies really present themselves [to say], ‘We are the future.’”

Yet Google hasn’t committed to a total change in its political course. When asked if the company would cease funding all groups or candidates who dispute climate change, Schmidt remarked at a September event in Washington: “We have been reviewing all of this. We, as a company, and certainly for me personally, we’re not one-issue people. So the decision to do these things is not as simple as yes-or-no.”

Facebook, Google and Yahoo still indirectly support ALEC through another trade group, NetChoice. That association participates on one of ALEC’s private-enterprise advisory panels. Google, meanwhile, is a supporter of HeritageAction, a conservative organization that has advocated against climate-change mandates.

All of the tech companies declined to make their D.C. leaders available for interviews. A spokeswoman for Yahoo only said the company taps political groups to advance its interests “even though we may not agree with all of the organization’s positions.” A Facebook spokesman offered a similar retort, adding that “our membership should not be viewed as an endorsement of any particular organization or policy.”

Facebook is no stranger to uncomfortable politics. The company this election season has tapped its trove of campaign cash to win new support among state attorneys general — regulators who can scrutinize its privacy practices. But Facebook’s donations, doled out to Democrats and Republicans alike, have landed in the hands of at least six state AGs who have openly opposed gay marriage, according to an analysis of state ethics records.

The company’s political action committee has contributed $10,000 to Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, who had opposed gay marriage before a federal court permitted it in his state. In 2012 and 2013, it gave more than $13,000 to Georgia AG Sam Olens, who said in June he would defend his state’s marriage ban. And Facebook’s PAC has donated $11,000 to Alabama Republican AG Luther Strange III, who previously fought efforts to allow gay marriage.

Yet Facebook maintains a robust LGBT organization within the company. It joined with other tech companies in a legal briefing advancing marriage equality in California, opposing Proposition 8. And Facebook itself has pointed to its campaign support for gay-marriage supporters, like California’s Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris. Recent attention to Facebook’s political activities nonetheless prompted the company in August to publish online the details of its donations and associations.

Tech companies have been stung in the past for their political ties. Yahoo departed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2011, a split that sources at the time attributed to the business lobby’s support for SOPA — and Yahoo’s opposition to it. Apple withdrew its backing in 2009, citing the Chamber’s approach to climate change. Google remains a member of the organization.

Others recently have seized on FWD.us, the group started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that raised money from Silicon Valley executives in order to advance immigration reform. “When it comes to politics, Silicon Valley is a teenager that grew up too fast and doesn’t understand the intricacies of the political system,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a top fellow at Stanford Law School.

FWD.us earlier this year ran ads that defended liberal and conservative candidates on issues unrelated to immigration, just in a bid to boost its supporters in Congress. The approach failed to resonate, Wadhwa said, because it didn’t reflect the “Silicon Valley way.”

To the tech industry’s political veterans, though, this is precisely the unique challenge they face.

“When you talk about companies like Facebook and Google, they are built on a more idealistic platform than a lot of major institutional companies historically have been,” Samuels said. “It’s part of their DNA that they engage on some of these social issues, that they engage their users. Politically, that puts them in a really tough spot. We don’t hold other companies to the same standards.”