What Comcast’s Failed Merger Tells Us About Corporate Lobbying

[Commentary] When Comcast first announced its intent to merge with Time Warner Cable in early 2014, the conventional wisdom suggested that even though everyone knew it was a terrible, anti-competitive merger, Comcast would use its lobbying muscle to ram the deal through. Now, with the news that Comcast was backing out of the merger after regulators sent strong we-won’t-approve-this signals, everybody is trying to explain where the conventional wisdom got it wrong. The simple reason that the merger failed was that Comcast and Time Warner Cable had a very weak case. But the key question is not why it failed. It’s why anyone thought they had any chance of making this deal happen in the first place.

The most likely explanation is that Comcast’s leaders over-estimated their influence. With so much in invested in lobbying, they had convinced themselves they could work magic in Washington. It’s an audacity that has come increasingly come to characterize corporate lobbying in Washington, as I describe in my new book, "The Business of America is Lobbying". And it’s a big problem for our democracy, because it means we’re going to continue devoting our limited public policy attention to things we shouldn’t even be debating in the first place. Corporations are the dominant actors in Washington, period. Business spends about $2.6 billion a year on reported lobbying -- about 80 percent of the total lobbying expenditures and roughly 34 times the meager sums spent on lobbying by public interest groups and labor unions combined. This means that large corporations mostly drive the agenda.