State Lawmakers Testify about Industry Influence on Privacy Bills in Vermont Hearing 

“The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, informed by a lot of the biggest players in the country and in the world who are parts of the State Privacy and Security Coalition, the AT&Ts and others, Amazon, and the likes,” Sen. Westerfield said. “You had a lot of people demanding that my bill not advance, or something like my bill not advance.”

“I will tell you, I have not in my six years, in my second term, seen as hard a lobbying job as these folks did. They put so much money into pushing and lobbying,” Del. Love said. “The more they pushed, the more we said — and not just me, also other legislators said — ‘Enough. We’re going to pass something that matters.’”

“At the very end, when they realized this bill was actually going through and it was going through with data minimization and it was going through the way it was, that’s when they pulled out small business: “Oh, this is going to hurt small businesses,” Del. Love said. “I think they’re learning that that’s something that sways legislators because we all care about our small businesses. And it was fascinating to watch the evolution because that was not an issue early on, and then you could see certain legislators have that talking point near the end.”

“Something we saw that was really hard to combat was that these companies organized local businesses and well-known Maine companies to speak on their behalf. In Maine, LL Bean is a well-known big company, and they became a big spokesperson for the interests of the bigger lobbying groups,” Rep. O’Neil said. “In Maine, if LL Bean says something, people are going to respect that.”