Facing a major regulatory issue, AT&T Inc. has unleashed the kind of lobbying blitz that makes it one of the grand corporate players of the great Washington game.
And yet, for all the money AT&T and other old-line telecom and cable companies have spent pushing their cause, they are poised to lose a key vote to a bunch of newer tech companies that never had anything to do with Washington until recently.
If the Federal Communications Commission votes today in favor of crafting rules to let the government oversee access to the Internet, it could be a sign of a fundamental shift of power under the Obama administration.
"This is totally new in Washington, that opposed to only the old Goliaths like AT&T, or traditional public utilities commissions or large insurance companies at the table, they are now joined by others like tech growth companies," said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Assn.
His trade group represents investors of Web giants such as Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
The vote is on a proposal that would begin a months-long process to formulate rules on how Internet service providers manage traffic on their networks so as not to block or unfairly slow some content. The proposal, favored by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, is expected to pass.
AT&T and other wireless and cable providers contend that the proposal amounts to giving the government control over the Internet, and that companies will lose the ability to reduce congestion on their networks.
Web service providers such as Google and Skype counter that they need unfettered access to all Internet users because the carriers could decide to block services that compete with their own.
In recent weeks, large telecommunications and cable firms have been flooding congressional offices with e-mail and phoning aides to try to get them to sign on to letters to Genachowski protesting his push for new net neutrality rules.
Staffers on Capitol Hill and at the FCC say the most active lobbyists have been from AT&T -- a company that is historically the largest donor to the political campaigns of Congress members. It has spent more than $8 million in lobbying this year on a wide variety of issues including net neutrality, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
