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Comment by LetsTalk | Hacker News Reader

According to

http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-hr-3261/1019110/con...

Lamar Smith has received $277,350 from groups that support the bill and $41,000 from those who do not.

The total contributions for all groups to all members of congress who support $49,802,962 the total for those who oppose $665,012. This stats that 98.68% of the total 504,67,974 lobbing dollars are from groups that support SOPA.

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Wow.

Does anyone know why Google/Apple/Other-super-giant-billion-dollar-companies aren't more proactive in influencing congress?

With all their billions, competing with $50 million seems like it would be a pretty insignificant cost for them - especially if the cost was shared among a consortium of companies. A few million per company seems like it'd be pretty cheap to ensure greater influence in preventing malignant legislation like SOPA.

Unfortunately it's not as easy as just pumping money into lobbying. It can take decades for special interests to build influence in Washington, and the entertainment industry has had a long head start over Google et al. Still, it seems likely that SOPA will end up being spoken about in the same breath as the MPAA's efforts to get VCRs banned in the early 80s.

Also, they might not be very keen to participate in such an immoral system ?

Google might also benefit greatly from SOPA. One possible scenario is that millions who are used to free content(and now hate big content companies due to SOPA) will use youtube much more, especially for longer content and share much more youtube content. This will help pull content producers and advertisers into youtube , turning into a big positive feedback cycle.

Apple probably stands to benefit from SOPA if more people end up downloading music/movies from itunes. I think microsoft / amazon are in the same boat with their own downloading services.

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