The tech industry has found a surprising new ally in its effort to shape public policy in Washington: the 82-year-old libertarian billionaire Charles Koch.

Two organizations founded by Koch, one an education-focused institute and the other a grant-making foundation, have spent the past year ramping up their efforts to shape public debate on tech policy topics like self-driving cars and the rights of online publishers.


And despite their ideological distance on issues like the Paris climate accord, the Koch groups and left-leaning Silicon Valley are working together to advance the argument that innovation is most likely to flourish when legislators and regulators leave it alone.

“We tend to think that there's a role for government, but it’s limited,” Jesse Blumenthal, who leads the Charles Koch Institute’s tech policy portfolio, said in an interview at the organization's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. He called technology a prime example of how people can see their quality of life improved, and their existences less constrained, when the free market is allowed to work.

The deep-pocketed Koch groups have the resources to help tech put on educational events, co-host conferences and fund academic research. But the alliance with Charles Koch also allows Silicon Valley to expand its contacts and influence in the age of Donald Trump — in a Washington that looks much different from what the tech executives who supported Hillary Clinton had expected after the 2016 election.

For an industry in need of new friends in D.C., amid threats of antitrust scrutiny and criticism of its role in enabling Russian election interference, the Kochs' deep ties to conservative circles may prove useful.

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Evan Engstrom, executive director of the San Francisco-based startup advocacy group Engine, said he had a “huh?” reaction when a mutual friend introduced him to Blumenthal. But Engstrom’s group later partnered with the Charles Koch Institute on a June training session for congressional staffers on encryption.

“There are not a lot of philanthropic foundations working in the tech policy space, particularly on forward-thinking tech issues,” Engstrom said. "I suspect we'll continue working together quite a bit.”

Others in tech, though, object to the new alliance.

“At some point the tech community needs to realize that our work has a moral dimension,” said Catherine Bracy, executive director of TechEquity Collaborative, a group advocating for fairness in the Bay Area economy. “Taking money from people who are dedicating their lives to undermining American democratic values, like openness and inclusion, goes against everything the internet is supposed to stand for.”

The Koch groups respond: “Understanding how people can be free to lead their best lives is foundational to what we do."

The Koch brothers — Charles and 77-year-old David — have emerged in recent years as major funders on the right side of the political aisle, with an infrastructure that at its peak in 2015 rivaled that of the Republican National Committee. Charles is no fan of Trump — saying a vote for Trump or Clinton was like choosing between “cancer or heart attack" — but the brothers have found common cause with Trump on one major issue of late: Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity has thrown its weight behind the tax code overhaul.

Silicon Valley, despite sharing some of the same libertarian impulses as the Kochs, votes overwhelmingly Democratic. The Koch groups, though, are finding their entry into the Washington tech arena largely welcomed by the industry's network of trade groups and policy organizations.

The Charles Koch Foundation, which says it's on track to give out $120 million in total grants this year, declines to break out its work in technology. But the groups’ new presence in Washington tech policy circles is becoming more visible.

In September, the Koch institute co-hosted a high-profile, daylong symposium with both the Newseum Institute and the Center for Democracy & Technology, a digital civil liberties group and Washington mainstay, focused on “creating a digital future where speech and democracy flourish.”

It's also helping to support the Technology Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank that drew a bipartisan crowd to a summit in Aspen, Colorado, this August and is in the early stages of funding academic research on the emerging field of artificial intelligence.

(Separately, POLITICO is a media partner with the Brookings Institution and the Charles Koch Institute in a series of debates about the United States’ changing role in the world, including one Monday in Las Vegas.)

The June event with Engine, co-hosted by the libertarian group TechFreedom, featured Ed Felten, an Obama White House deputy chief technology officer who's since returned to his professorship at Princeton University. Felten, over a lunch of fried chicken sandwiches, used a whiteboard to explain the “nuts and bolts” of encryption to a room packed with Capitol Hill staffers.

For the Charles Koch Institute, getting that passel of congressional aides educated on the basics of encryption is “worth a train ticket and Chick-fil-A," said Blumenthal.

The Koch Institute views encryption as providing the strong digital privacy protections that citizens need to live out free lives — in contrast to law enforcement advocates who say it allows terrorists and drug smugglers to hide on the internet. The group argues that self-driving cars might need some rules of the road but that regulators should take a light touch. And it believes that holding websites responsible for what users post on them — as Congress is poised to do, with bipartisan bills that target online sex trafficking ads — is one step toward “turning the platforms into checkpoints the government can use to censor speech."

Those positions overlap nearly completely with what major tech firms like Apple, Google and Facebook have advanced.

For Democrats, the Koch brothers have long served as the epitome of everything wrong with the right. One party email pitch from 2011, for example, warned that Republicans were out-fundraising the left by “relying on right-wing billionaires like the Koch Brothers and secret special interest money.”

The tech industry, meanwhile, is far apart from Charles Koch on approaches to combating climate change. While Silicon Valley executives have condemned Trump's move to pull out of the Paris climate accord, Koch argues the U.S. shouldn't serve as the world’s “pigeon” in agreements to clamp down on greenhouse gas pollution.

But lately the tech sector has found itself on the same side as the Kochs on key issues in the Trump era. The billionaire brothers, for example, have opposed the president's travel ban, which restricts entry to the U.S. from eight countries, six of which are majority-Muslim — a policy the tech industry also opposes.

While the Koch groups are expanding their work in tech and innovation issues, they tend to stay away from telecom policy, because the field is too crowded with other groups, and intellectual property like patents and copyrights, because classical liberal thought on the issue is too divided, Blumenthal said.

Chris Calabrese, vice president for policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, which co-hosted the September event at the Newseum with the Koch team, calls them “really great partners.” Working with the Koch group, he says, has helped his organization expand its scope.

He points to Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, who addressed the Newseum event. Pai began his talk on free speech by saying of the event's three hosts, “I think it’s fair to say these three groups might not always agree on everything.”

"One of the reasons Chairman Pai, I think, spoke at our event was because CKI was able to reach out to him,” Calabrese said.

Beyond Washington, the Koch foundation says it's also increased support for academics considering tech policy, including a Texas A&M accounting professor launching a center for the study of innovation and a Georgia Tech public policy expert who works on issues related to internet governance.

“We have the luxury of having a longer time horizon than most organizations do,” said Blumenthal. “And the hope is, five or 10 years from now, when think tanks or whomever are looking for policy experts, you have these people who have been studying and thinking about these policy questions.”

The pattern of hosting events, giving grants to academics, and placing op-eds — Blumenthal and Engine’s Engstrom co-wrote one in August for The Hill — is part of a playbook the Koch groups have developed across other areas like foreign policy and what they call corporate cronyism.

Until now, tech was “the baby of the bunch," Blumenthal said.

Engstrom, the Engine executive director, said he hasn’t gotten any blowback from member companies or others in Silicon Valley over partnering with the Charles Koch-founded groups.

“I think people recognize that forward-thinking technologies can make strange bedfellows,” he said.

