USA*ENGAGE

Capitalist tool

Lobbyists becoming Web-wise

Carter Dougherty
The Washington Times
March 22, 2000

Cyberspace is no longer just for citizen activists.

With its savvy Internet lobbying campaigns, corporate America has gotten off the digital sidelines. Its seasoned Washington lobbyists are turning on its head the assumption that the Internet would aid primarily resource-poor citizens groups allied against corporate interests.

On issues that range from the current fight in Congress over China trade relations to today's Supreme Court case on trade sanctions, business groups are employing the Web to influence public opinion and mount grass-roots-style lobbying campaigns.

"We decided that we needed the Internet to make our job easier and more effective," said Calman Cohen of the Business Coalition for U.S.-China Trade, a lobbying group supporting permanent normal trade relations (NTR) with China.

Until now, citizens groups, rather than business, have generated the biggest headlines for their use of the Internet.

In May of 1998, an Internet-coordinated uprising killed an international investment agreement being negotiated in Paris. And last fall, it helped protesters bring a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle to a standstill.

The increased political activity on line is attracting attention.

A new commission on the Internet's political potential has begun wrestling with how the medium will affect American politics. The Democracy Online Project, chaired by former Reps. Patricia Schroeder, Colorado Democrat, and Rick White, Washington Republican, also will look into Internet lobbying.

The Internet's potential for business groups is large enough to have spawned at least one Washington public relations firm that specializes in the intersection between technology and lobbying.

The D.C.-based Bivings Group has developed "Internet advocacy" campaigns for corporate America since 1996. The Organization for International Investment, a Washington-based association of foreign firms with subsidiaries in the United States, along with the plastics industry and biotechnology giant Monsanto are among the Bivings clients who have discovered how to make the Internet work for them.

"The magic does not lie in the technology, but in the application of the tool," said Mark Story, a project manager with Bivings.

The Bivings Group also runs the Web site of USA-Engage (located at www.usaengage.com), a group dedicated to combating the go-it-alone approach of the United States to economic sanctions.

The principal member of USA-Engage, the National Foreign Trade Council, has chosen litigation. The Supreme Court is hearing a case on such unilateral sanctions today. But USA-Engage as a whole chose the Internet as one means to mount a sustained lobbying campaign.

In 1998, the United States banned new investment in Burma in response to human rights violations. That same year, the Clinton administration restricted U.S. exports to India and Pakistan following nuclear-weapons tests.

U.S. business claims that measures like these cost them up to $18 billion each year as foreign firms scoop up contracts lost to unilateral American sanctions. USA-Engage set out to shrink that number.

"We realized that a lot of groups pushing unilateral sanctions were using the Internet," said Bill Lane, a lobbyist for construction-machinery giant Caterpillar. "They had beat us to the punch."

Now, USA-Engage can boast a sophisticated site with resources for journalists, for congressional staff and for small- and medium-sized businesses nationwide to lobby their congressmen in their districts.

"They are armed with the facts," Mr. Lane said.

The site did not come cheap. USA-Engage has paid about $100,000 to develop and maintain the site, Mr. Story said.

Though it is impossible to isolate the impact of the Internet on a multifaceted crusade, it is clear public opinion, at least on Capitol Hill, has already shifted. Many legislators have come to regard unilateral sanctions skeptically.

In many foreign policy circles, the notion that the United States is suffering from a proliferation of unilateral sanctions is gospel, a point of view people like Mr. Lane can only endorse.

If this shift is in part a result of careful, digital-age lobbying, one benefit of the Internet came to USA-Engage entirely by chance. In 1999, the question of whether unilateral sanctions are effective became the topic for a nationwide college debating league. The number of "hits" to the USA-Engage Web site skyrocketed from about 40,000 to more than 118,000 per month.

As Mr. Lane puts it, the Internet is allowing the business lobby to "educate the next generation of American leaders that unilateral sanctions don't work."

On the China issue, the Electronic Industries Association (EIA) has taken to cyberspace so that its companies, and their employees, can hold the politicians' feet to the fire.

"The Internet lets us get to many, many more people than trade shows," said Robert Nichols, spokesman for the EIA.

EIA began its effort to support passage of permanent NTR with China at two recent trade shows in Anaheim, Calif., and Las Vegas.

By tapping their addresses into a laptop, representatives of high-tech firms that do not have lobbyists in Washington could bang out a letter to their congressmen and senators. Early this month, EIA began using the software on its Web site so that its most active companies and their employees can pressure politicians.

The group hopes that the Internet will be one of its most potent weapons as both supporters and opponents of permanent NTR for China go after undecided members of Congress in their districts during the Easter recess, Mr. Nichols said.

But if business groups have begun to tap the potential of the Internet as a lobbying tool, it is in part because their opponents in the trade debate showed the way.

Michael Dolan, field organizer for Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, believes that the Internet is particularly suited to citizens groups.

A highly decentralized tool like the Internet helps loose associations such as these work together, Mr. Dolan said. He ridicules the notion that large sums of money will make business groups more effective using Internet lobbying.

"All it means is that they will have more more handsome Web sites," he said.

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