Undermining Lobbying Coalitions: The Interest Group Politics of Internet Content Regulation

Recent research has shown that under conditions of high public salience heterogeneous interest group coalitions that unite business and civil society groups are more successful in achieving their lobbying objective than homogeneous coalitions (Junk 2019; Phinney 2017). The reason is that heterogeneous coalitions can signal broad societal support for (or opposition to) a policy. How can rival interest groups or political entrepreneurs respond to such heterogeneous coalition? I argue that they can actively seek to undermine the effective signaling of the heterogeneous coalition by highlighting that civil society and business groups are indeed “strange bedfellows”. In particular, they can work to delegitimize the ideational motives of civil society activists by pointing out how they help the material interests of their business allies. I test this mechanism by investigating two instances of copyright reform in the European Union, the failed ACTA treaty of 2011 and the successfully adopted Copyright Directive of 2019. Whereas a heterogeneous coalition of digital rights groups and tech firms prevailed in stopping the ratification of ACTA, the same coalition failed to achieve its goal in the negotiations on the 2019 Directive. I demonstrate that publishers strategically chose their framing at a moment in which tech platforms – after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump – were widely accused of hurting democracy. This strategy explicitly discredited the coalition between digital rights activists and their business allies. Their arguments were subsequently taken up by lawmakers in the European Parliament to justify their support for the Directive even in the face of large-scale public protests. The paper makes two contributions: Theoretically, it adds to the literature on the lobbying success of heterogeneous interest group coalitions by drawing on insights from the policy feedback literature. Substantively, it sheds light on the changing patterns of political contestation regarding Internet content regulation.