At the start of this year, the so-called EU transparency register reached a staggering 9,000 entries. Which is to say that 9,000 organisations lined up to lobby the European Commission, and the European Parliament on policy and legislation. And they all mean business—at a conservative estimate, €1.5 billion (~£1.19 billion) is spent on EU lobbying each year.

Between December 2014 and December 2015, European commissioners and their advisers held 7,084 meetings with lobbyists—of which, a whopping 75 percent of those confabs were with companies and industry representatives.

Big tech firms spend heavily on lobbying in Brussels, and no prizes for guessing that Google tops the list. A report by Transparency International in June 2015 found that the search and ad giant racked up 29 meetings last year. Only BusinessEurope, which represents industry associations in no less than 34 countries, outranked Google's lobbying prowess.

If the latest figures from the EU's official Transparency Register are to be believed, we're told Microsoft spends up to €4.5 million (£3.56 million), while Google shells out up to €3.75 million (£2.97 million) per year. In the US, Google stumped up roughly €15 million (£11.9 million) last year, while Microsoft spent more than €7.5 million (£5.9 million).

Since taking over the EC in 2014, Jean Claude Juncker has made it mandatory for companies wishing to meet with Brussels' officials to record their information on the joint transparency register. It is also necessary to sign up to the register to get a lobbyist badge to enter the European Parliament. However, there's a caveat: over the years many discrepancies have been found between the official register, and the real on-the-ground lobbying work. Many in the Brussels Bubble, as it has come to be known, think of it as one of the city’s greatest works of fiction.

Surf the astroturf

Astroturfing, where companies hide behind a benign name or coalition to further their influence, is rife. For example, the European Privacy Association (EPA)—a name that would easily lead one to think it's an organisation in favour of strong privacy laws—was forced to admit that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are its corporate backers.

There is also safety in numbers. FairSearch, an organisation set up to oppose Google in its lengthy battle with competition officials in Brussels, counts members that include Admarketplace.com, Allegro, Expedia, Foundem, Nokia, Oracle, TripAdvisor, and Twenga.

ICOMP (Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace), meanwhile, has more than 25 members, including the Premier League. However, it is primarily funded by Microsoft, and—until late last year—was (like FairSearch) almost entirely focussed on lobbying against Google's alleged dominance in the search market.

But at the beginning of this year, a decision was made inside Microsoft to back away from that approach. It’s not yet a case of “all friends together” but after so many years as mutual antagonists the change in tone is significant.

Sundar Pichai made his first trip to Brussels as Google CEO at the end of February, and met with formidable competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager. Vestager—widely held to be the inspiration for the main character in the Danish TV series Borgen—is viewed with a mixture of awe, and fear in Brussels. She benefits from following the hapless Joaquin Almunia into the hotseat, having stuck to her guns despite growing accusations of anti-Americanism throughout her first year in the job.

The European Technology Alliance—not to be confused with the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance, which brings together researchers, commercial technology providers, private, and corporate language technology users—could be seen as setting up in reaction to the might of the big American companies. The 25 members of that group—which wants to further the interests of homegrown digital companies—include the likes of BlaBlaCar, Spotify, and SwiftKey, which was recently purchased by Microsoft. Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström set up the group for companies that are “European in origin” or “perceived as a European company.” Skype is also owned by Microsoft.

US tech giants, then, typically dominate digital lobbying in Brussels.

In December 2015, the Sunlight Foundation published a report which found that American organisations exert “an influence that far outstrips other significant non-European economies and often rivals organisations from European powers like Germany, France and Great Britain.”

European Technology Alliance spokesman Fabrizio Porrino told Ars: “The issue in Brussels is that you have many so-called lobby groups that are somehow European, but when you look at the membership many of them, they are 90 or 80 percent run by American or non-European companies.”

Clearly, it always pays to look closely at the membership of these lobbying organisations. Last August, a group calling itself the European Data Coalition called for the EU’s planned data protection law to be watered down. The org described itself as representing “20 European companies, from SMEs to global multinationals.”

But in fact it was more a “Swedish Data Coalition,” given that over half its members happen to be headquartered there. One of its “companies” is in fact a small Spanish university, another a Swedish cancer charity, and there's even a company listed on there that isn’t European-owned at all. It's in South Africa.

Listing image by Steve Collis