User Lobbying

Google has heard that you, small business owner, are concerned about potential rules and regulations that could impact Google:

"Some of you have also expressed concerns about proposed regulations in Congress" ...to do things like enforce anti-monopoly rules and protect data privacy.

Just imagine how your productivity would be impacted if Google couldn't provide every service you use to work, or if Google didn't reap one third of global advertising dollars. I'm a Google customer in a variety of departments, and find this kind of user lobbying disappointing.

HT Micah Sifry at The Connector

As usual, the gig economy apps are most likely to enlist their users -- and gig workers themselves -- when they face regulation. Prop 22 in California, which would classify drivers and delivery people as employees of the companies, has scared them enough to engage in extreme tactics.

After last week’s coverage of Epic vs. Apple, here’s another example of a company asking its users to engage in a campaign against a competing company: Mozilla’s #YouTubeRegrets campaign and browser extension. 

YouTube's related videos algorithm is responsible for over 70% of viewing time, and sometimes recommends harmful videos. I recently learned that even people at YouTube aren’t sure which videos the recommendation engine sends users to. AI!

Mozilla built a browser extension (for Firefox and Chrome, too) that lets users report bad video recommendations. Heads up: The extension does report information about your YouTube history to Mozilla.

I spoke to Laurence Dodds at the Telegraph on Epic's #FreeFortnite campaign, which asks Fortnite players to lobby Apple to reinstate the company in the app store. It's a rare case of a company asking its users to lobby another company, although the precedent does exist in cable TV channels enlisting their viewers to lobby cable providers to continue paying their fees. Epic is hardly alone in fighting Apple on its “Apple tax”, where Apple competitors across different verticals must pay an additional 30% of subscriptions to the company. They have been one of the most vocal companies about the App Store policy, and taken some of the boldest, if potentially miscalculated, steps to fight it.

Of Apple’s many anti-competitive practices, enforcing a de facto 30% tax on competing products is one of the most egregious. Spotify has responded with a microsite campaign. There’s no call to action for users, though, it’s targeted instead at media and policymakers. Thanks Powen for the tip.

This one’s more actual utility than social utility, but we’re including it here for the sheer brazenness of National Grid leveraging its energy customers to lobby on its behalf. Kudos David Moore @ppolitics for the spot.

Uber Austria campaigns to its own users. Link courtesy Yussi Pick.

Tesla has joined the ranks of companies enlisting their customers to lobby on their behalf. In this case, the company is asking their fans / customers to lobby their local representatives to allow the company to bypass the car dealership model of auto sales. It’s worth noting that Tesla’s campaign is in context of the dealership lobby funding their own attacks on the company.

Hat tip to Electrek for finding this.

Email text:

Hi,

At Tesla, we’re accelerating the future of sustainable energy with groundbreaking electric cars and energy products.

As you may know, New Mexico is currently one of a handful of states that prohibit manufacturers from selling directly to consumers, and also prohibits Tesla from opening any service locations in the state.

In an effort to provide the full Tesla experience to New Mexico customers like you, we are supporting SB255 to allow car manufacturers like Tesla to sell and service directly to consumers in New Mexico.

Please consider contacting your legislator here to ask them to support SB255 and your freedom to choose how to purchase your vehicle.

The passage of this bill will help Tesla continue to accelerate the future of sustainable energy.

Thank you for your support.

Best Regards, Meredith Roberts, Tesla Policy Team

@ceodonovan mentioned this humble Tumblr in an excellent piece on user lobbying, or as she coins it, Brobilizing: when tech startups politically mobilize their customers to evade regulation. Read her article on the companies encouraging people to take to the streets over scooters.

Caroline O’Donovan of Buzzfeed caught this email from Bird, the scooter company, joining Lime’s protest against the City of Santa Monica’s regulation of its streets and sidewalks.

In a move straight out of the ridesharing playbook, Lime is rallying its users to lobby for its continued operations in Santa Monica after the City ran a pilot and decided to grant permits to two of their competitors, instead. Also like Uber and Lyft, Lime will offer monetary discounts to users who use the service to travel to the protest.

Thanks Mat Morgan for the tip!

As expected, the electric scooter companies are following the Uber / Airbnb urban playbook of launch first, deal with regulators later. A key part of this strategy is to leverage your customers to lobby rulemakers on your company’s behalf, as Bird is doing here. Thanks to Mat Honan for the tip.

Some web companies are still willing to rally their users for net neutrality

eBay’s Government Affairs outreach team is once again reaching out to eBay sellers to mobilize them and prevent the State of New York from applying a sales tax to online marketplaces. It’s sadly ironic to see “eBay Main Street” fighting against cities and towns collecting revenues to maintain their Main Streets.

The email sends users to an action page, where they’re asked to contact their state officials by eBay’s contact form or Twitter. Full email text below:

Net neutrality is one of those times where companies have mobilized their users in their users’ best interests, compared to companies like Uber that leverage their users political speech to avoid basic regulations. As the net neutrality fight has drawn out, though, Joe Pinsker argues that big tech’s initial support appears to have faded. They still make supportive statements, sure, but aren’t rallying the forces like they used to.

Patagonia gets into politics with their new #monumentalmistake campaign. The company currently has a complete homepage takeover directing users to tweet-petition President Donald Trump, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, and Senator Orrin Hatch over their decision to drastically shrink the size of two of Utah’s national monuments. 

As to why they’re taking this action, Patagonia says:

The petition also allows users to opt in to Patagonia marketing emails and/or SMS campaign updates. People can also text DEFEND to 52886 to sign up. The SMS campaign is powered by Phone2Action. Phone2Action has also been hired by Lyft and Ben & Jerry’s to politically activate their customers.

In many of the examples I’ve collected of companies politically mobilizing their users, the company is looking to avoid government regulation of their business (Uber, Airbnb). A counterexample is when technology companies go out of their way to mobilize users around protecting net neutrality. 

This week, Reddit organized a contact Congress campaign, alternatively thanking and shaming Senators who stand up or submit to the telecom industry. One interesting byproduct of the crowd-led campaign was that, for a moment in time, the front page of Reddit was full of citizens talking about who represents them and how those elected representatives are doing at their job. Compare this to news that someone falsely impersonated hundreds of thousands of Americans and used their identities to spam the FCC commenting period.

Hal Hodson at The Economist caught an interesting update to Uber’s data policy: “Uber may also use the information to inform you about elections, ballots, referenda and other political and policy processes that relate to our services.” 

There is a world in which Uber offers election reminders based on where people live, as Facebook’s civic engagement team does. It is more likely that Uber will be sending notifications to users about elections and referenda that threaten their anti-regulatory business practices in key markets (which Facebook would rightly shy away from). Uber has already done this, and offered free rides to the polls for its users, but now appear to be including this in their policy agreement.

The Verge has a great round-up of today’s internet-wide day of action to convince Trump’s FCC not to scrap net neutrality rules. Net neutrality remains the single issue that the web’s biggest tech properties are willing to drop everything to support.

Fight for the Future, the organizers behind the cyberprotest, have enlisted the following allies:

Automattic (Wordpress), Amazon, Mozilla, Netflix, Etsy, Kickstarter, Soundcloud, Dropbox, Spotify, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Medium, Y Combinator, GitHub, Pantheon, Opera, Bittorrent Inc., Shapeways, Nextdoor, Stack Overflow, Funny Or Die, Dreamhost, and CREDO Mobile, Goldenfrog, Fark, Chess.com, Namecheap, DuckDuckGo, Checkout.com, Sonic, Ting, ProtonMail, O’Reilly Media, SlashDot, Dribble, Dischord, SourceForge, and Union Square Ventures. Organizations participating include Fight for the Future, Free Press Action Fund, Demand Progress, Center for Media Justice, EFF, Internet Association, Internet Archive, World Wide Web Foundation, Creative Commons, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Greenpeace, Common Cause, ACLU, Rock the Vote, American Library Association, Daily Kos, OpenMedia, The Nation, PCCC, MoveOn, OFA, Public Knowledge, OTI, Color of Change, MoveOn, Free Software Foundation, Internet Creators Guild, the Women’s March, and many others.

Fight for the Future is back with “The Battle for the Net”, an internet-wide day of action to protect net neutrality in the age of Trump. According to the site, Amazon, Twitter, Kickstarter, Netflix, Vimeo, Github, reddit, Imgur, Medium, Spotify, Yelp, and other internet giants will participate on July 12th.