By Getty. The Google gold rush The EU’s Google action has turned Brussels into El Dorado for the city’s tech community.

No sooner had Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, accused Google of violating antitrust laws last week than the mobile phones of Brussels-based lawyers started buzzing with messages from LinkedIn telling them that Microsoft’s local law firm needed two anti-trust lawyers — and fast.

The listing from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, urged lawyers to get in touch “without delay” and urged them not to wait until the May 3 deadline to apply. The company says the timing was coincidental — yet the mad scramble for top talent is definitely on.

The recently re-awakened zeal of European regulators to bring American technology titans to heel is also accelerating a hiring frenzy by Brussels lobby shops and law firms, as they scramble to recruit and hire staffers to fight back. The message for the city’s tech community is clear: If you’re a lobbyist with any European anti-trust experience, Brussels is your El Dorado.

“Not participating in the legislative process here is not an option for companies with ambitions beyond their home markets,” said Mark MacGann, the head of public policy for Uber, the U.S.-based ride-on-demand start-up. “If you’re not in, you can’t win.”

And the gold rush is not just about Google: Both tech and telecom companies have been hiring steadily over the past six months while kick-starting a flurry of meetings with the Commission’s top brass.

Uber is only just one example of a tech company with plans to expand its lobbying operations here. The company, which has encountered intense political hostility in most European capital and operates in some markets in a legal gray area, recently employed two ex-Google EU corporate affairs veterans, Simon Hampton and Antoine Aubert.

MacGann told POLITICO he expects to double the size of his office — from three to six — by the end of the year.

Facebook is also increasing its presence here. Given Google’s battle royal with the Commission, it should come as no surprise that the search engine giant is also staffing up. However, it’s likely that at least some of the four positions now being advertised are to replace recent departures — including Aubert, whose relatively sudden move from Google to Uber left insiders puzzled.

The EU’s register of lobbying activity reveals that Google spent €1.5 million on “direct lobbying” in 2013 — up from €600,000 in 2011. But the indirect costs of Google’s efforts to influence the debate are much higher, even though the company keeps much of their Brussels lobbying effort in-house. Microsoft tends to outsource its lobbying activities.

The register also reveals a flurry of lobbying on the part of tech companies since the Commission announced it would give renewed impetus to plans to create a digital single market, which aims to establish a unified area in which goods and services obtained online are not slowed by national borders.

Among the companies that have joined the lobbying register since the Commission’s announcement are Amazon, Cisco, Netflix, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Storify, Spotify, Time Warner Inc., Verizon and booking.com.

The tech companies are putting their beefed-up offices to good use. According to records available under the European Commission’s new transparency regime, Uber, Google and AT&T have met with several commissioners and their cabinets over the past month.

Since November 2014, Microsoft sought meetings with at least four different cabinets, including those of Andrus Ansip, the vice president for the digital single market, and Gunther Oettinger, the commissioner in charge of the digital economy and society.

Just as noteworthy is that Michael Hager, the head of Oettinger’s cabinet, met three times with Microsoft lobbyists in as many months — a set of meetings which would have been highly unusual for Oettinger’s predecessor, Neelie Kroes.

“It just makes very good sense to be more present at the moment,” said one prominent tech insider working for a US-based start-up. “There are just so many tech issues on the horizon, like the digital single market and net neutrality. We can’t afford to be ignored.”

For its part, Commission officials seem unfazed by the increase in lobbying efforts and reject suggestions there has been any activity out of the ordinary in recent days. A Commission official told POLITICO that information on lobbying efforts is regularly exchanged at weekly internal meetings among advisors and directors general and, so far, none of the officials have flagged unusual lobbying practices.

Yet the widely-held belief that the tech lobbying industry is facing a key challenge has seen anti-Google sentiment gather steam — fed largely by lobbyists and organizations with ties to competing technology firms. There is now a consensus building that Google is paying the price for having misread the EU political landscape.

“Google is offering us an example of what not to do,” a lobbyist working for another US-based tech giant told POLITICO. “There they were spending millions on lobbying — for what? To fall out of favor with the Commission and risk massive fines.”

The consensus is that Google now knows it put all of its eggs in one basket — and the wrong one. Its lobbyists had assumed the former competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, would be able to reach a deal over the Commission’s competition concerns and avoid a public fight.

“They clearly know they have done something wrong so far,” the lobbyist said. “They had become too complacent.”

Google did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.

For lobbyists working for U.S. companies in Brussels the issue is not academic. The fear is that Google’s intransigence in the face of Commission concerns about the alleged bias of its search engine results is feeding broader anti-American sentiment in the EU, which had been on the rise since the Edward Snowden/NSA revelations two years ago.

“All of this is taking place just as the EU is examining the future of the digital single market,” the lobbyist said. “U.S. companies have now become a convenient scapegoat. It is much easier to attack us than to have an honest conversation about why the U.S. has produced industry leaders and the EU has not.”

Another lobbyist for a U.S. tech company says Google’s lobbying efforts also mark a cultural failure — an inability to grasp where Europe’s priorities lie.

“When [Google] came to Europe it was all about cute cat videos and how great it was to be able to Google them,” the lobbyist told POLITICO. “But now the Commission is asking: what is all of this contributing to our economy? It’s not just about beating down Americans; it’s about trying to save European companies.”

This could explain why some U.S. tech companies are eschewing Google’s shock-and-awe lobbying efforts in favor of more low-key consensus-building. Netflix, for example, has a corporate affairs team of five — in the entire world. This is in spite of the fact that it has more to lose than many tech companies from the EU’s timid approach to removing geo-blocking restrictions.

Other lobbyists fear Google could be the lever which the EU uses to push ahead with greater overall regulation, which would have an impact on all tech companies — even those who have been pushing for a competition investigation into Google’s search engine results.

“The investigation [into Google] will be a positive step,” says Kostas Rossoglou, who since March has been the one-person lobbying office for Yelp, the U.S.-based publisher of crowd-sourced reviews (although a second person started work this week in Germany). “But competition laws are adequate to deal with this. More regulation, which obliges search engines to provide its search results, will be difficult to enforce.”

However, industry insiders note that the lobbying recruitment is not spread evenly across the tech industry, with most hires coming from U.S. companies that see problems with EU anti-trust laws on the horizon.

“Fears of greater regulation are not enough to make you employ more people,” one such insider said. “Fear of competition laws and the fines they can bring are the real driving force.”

Which is why competition lawyers now working for the EU may want to move quickly if they are planning to hit the revolving door in the hope of becoming high-paid lobbyists. While there is little doubt that the trend of more lobbying hires is likely to continue for some time, that enthusiasm may not continue in the long term.

Indeed, once the Google case runs its course, the investigation could eventually be read as a lobbying failure, dampening U.S.-based tech companies’ willingness to throw money at the lobbying industry.

This story has been updated to reflect additional comment from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP.

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