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Microsoft's Political Lobbying Record

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the gotta-spend-it-somewhere dept.

pierreduFwench writes "With the U.S. national elections just around the corner, you may find this interesting: Opensecrets.org, a website focusing on 'Responsive Politics' recently published lobbying and donations info for the 2002 elections (to date). You can see the breakdown of Microsoft's individual dossier here. Also, looking at the 'Top Donations by Industry', you may notice that Microsoft is, conspicuously, the only entry under 'Computers/Internet.'" Very interesting graphs.

1 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Open Source community needs a PAC by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Informative
    This is a fabulous idea. We are pretty good at organizing, very politically opinionated on certain issues that may not be of interest to the general population but affect all of our lives, and we have a rather high mean income, so we could all afford to give a bit of money.


    Wait a second, isn't the EFF supposed to do this already? I guess the EFF spreads their efforts out a bit, and perhaps fails to focus strongly enough on the legislative branch, and lobbying Congress to pass bills more friendly to the technology community. The EFF seems to get stuck in the judicial process, relying on the admittedly somewhat more rights-friendly judiciary to save our asses. Frankly, I don't think the Free Software Foundation, which you mention, is the kind of organization I would want representing my point of view in the political arena, though I think they have done a lot of great work to promote Free Software. I think we could accomplish a lot with an organization that existed to promote legislation friendly to the cause of freedom online, that had a pro-Free Software stance without being radically dogmatic.


    In the meantime, why not donate to EFF?