Amazon Quietly Backs Right-Wing Lobbying Group Targeting Tech Antitrust Legislation: Report

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN has poured more than $1 million into a lobbying effort seeking to block the passage of antitrust legislation aimed at major U.S. technology companies.

What Happened: According to a Bloomberg report citing unnamed sources "familiar with the organization’s funding,” the Seattle-based company is backing The Competitiveness Coalition, which was founded in March and is captained by Scott Brown, a former Republican senator from Massachusetts and U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand during the Trump administration.

The Competitiveness Coalition Competitiveness has conducted meetings in Washington with Republican lawmakers and churned out television advertisements and op-ed columns opposing the legislation.

However, federal law does not require advocacy organizations to voluntarily identify the names of their donors, thus making the Bloomberg report the first public link between Amazon and the lobbyists.

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Why It Matters: Lobbying by the major tech companies is hardly new. Amazon and its rivals — Alphabet Inc. GOOG, Apple AAPL and Meta Platforms META — have used their money over the years to win friends and influence votes on Capitol Hill.

However, Competitiveness Coalition Competitiveness seeks to give the impression of being a grassroots campaign rather than a concentrated industry effort to force a legislative outcome.

Bloomberg also reported the coalition “was spawned by the National Taxpayers Union, a conservative advocacy organization, and counts more than a dozen right-leaning groups as members.” An NTU spokesman acknowledged that his organization “incubated the Competitiveness Coalition to oppose antitrust policies that do not work for consumers and taxpayers.”

Amazon and other major tech companies have financed the NTU, which remains focused on deregulation of leading industries. The e-commerce giant also hired Mattie Duppler, NTU’s senior fellow of fiscal policy, in November 2020 to coordinate with conservative third-party groups.

Duppler is “instrumental in helping to set up the Competitiveness Coalition, pulling from her NTU experience and close relationships with taxpayer groups across Washington, according to two of the people familiar with the process,” Bloomberg reported.

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