CTRL-ALT-Delete? The internet industry’s DC powerhouse vanishes

The Internet Association (IA) has been shedding staff, losing influence on Capitol Hill and shrinking to near-obscurity in media coverage of tech policy debates in Washington, even as the industry faces controversies ranging from alleged monopolization to privacy to how it treats its legions of workers. The declining prominence of IA, a nine-year-old group that used to call itself “the unified voice of the internet economy,” comes as a larger fragmentation is splitting the tech industry’s lobbying efforts into factions. In its place, other tech-focused advocacy groups—including a new startup headed by a former Google executive—have stepped into the void to speak for the companies on antitrust. Because IA is a coalition of small and large companies, with vastly different perspectives on the topic, it declared from its founding that it would not lobby on competition-related issues. That’s a real impediment as Congress gets serious about passing sweeping antitrust bills that could fundamentally change how Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple do business, while pleasing smaller rivals like Yelp and Spotify.