Bob Christie/AP Photo
Arizona Republican Rep. Regina Cobb during a committee hearing in Phoenix, May 2019
For elected officials who want to propose Big Tech reform, Arizona state Rep. Regina Cobb (R) has a warning: They have to prepare for the lobbying and intimidation that comes with it.
“I’m trying to be as honest and frank as I possibly can to make it known that these are the pressures that are going to come on your legislators,” Cobb said in an interview with the Prospect. “You gotta have a good champion; someone that’s gonna go the distance with them and I hope they do have that.”
Cobb sponsored Arizona’s state House bill HB 2005, to reform how mobile app stores collect their commission from apps with in-app purchases. Currently, most apps that cost money to install, or have in-app stores or subscriptions available, pay Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store a fee of 15 or 30 percent to process that payment. Amazon and Uber are notable exceptions to this. Other large subscription-based companies, like Spotify or Netflix, only let consumers pay for their services on a computer-accessed website to avoid the large commission cut. But most companies that need access to mobile phone users are forced to pay the commission, or risk being kicked off the app store all together.
Just days after lawmakers introduced the legislation in Arizona, Apple and Google went to work hiring local lobbyists and consultants to try to kill it. Those lobbyists took their clients’ agenda to Cobb almost immediately.
“I knew I was going to have that pressure, but I didn’t expect it to be so quickly,” Cobb says. The weekend after she introduced the bill, she received 30 texts from lobbyists. She explains how unusual this was because people know that from Saturday afternoon until Monday, Cobb, who is religious, strictly reserves her time for family and faith.
“They usually respect that and don’t cross that line. And the messages I was getting were not the normal ‘Hey, can we talk to you about your bill, we have concerns about it,’ that kind of thing,” Cobb says. “It was messages that were very strong messages against it. Messages that almost shamed me for doing it, for taking it on.”
One such message seen by the Prospect told Cobb that HB 2005 wasn’t “the type of bill [she] would run” and accused her of sending the wrong message to “the tech world” about Arizona. The message continued: “As someone who cares about you I’m worried you’re going to be put in a position to defend a bill that, in my opinion, is anti business …”
Cobb would not share the names of the specific lobbyists who texted her, saying that she knows that she will still have to work with these people on other issues.
Policy Development Group and Willetta Partners were hired by Apple, as were Kirk Adams, Constantin Querard, Michael Foulkes, and Timothy Powderly in March 2021, according to the Arizona Secretary of State lobbyist database, joining Goodman Schwartz, Geoffrey Wurzel, and Rod Diridon, who were already registered. Google hired Summit Consulting and Gov Group, in addition to four other people and firms registered before the legislation.
However, Cobb says the text messages actually made her more determined to support the bill. “I dug my heels in and I thought, you’re not going to do this to me,” Cobb says. Apple’s lobbyist Kirk Adams, former Speaker of the Arizona House and former chief of staff to Gov. Doug Ducey, called Cobb to arrange an apology meeting. But Cobb says she was not going to be told what to do in her own House.
Before the lobbyist team expanded, Cobb says there was bipartisan interest in her bill. Across the country, the emerging support for legislation to address monopoly power has been bipartisan and at times not easily predictable. At the state level, Republicans like Cobb in Arizona, as well as others in North Dakota and Georgia, introduced app store reform bills in 2021, as did Democrats in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Hawaii state legislatures.
Across the country, the emerging support for legislation to address monopoly power has been bipartisan and at times not easily predictable.
Nationally, antitrust is mostly a Democratic priority, but when it comes to Big Tech specifically, progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and conservative Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have called for reform. A hearing on app store structure in the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee will be held next week; Apple initially balked at sending any representative to testify, leading to condemnation from both subcommittee chair Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and ranking member Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Apple eventually relented and will send a witness to the hearing.
This bipartisan support to weaken the power of the tech platforms can be a curse in a polarized environment. When Warren tweeted about Arizona’s app store reform bill in early March, one Arizona political operative responded by saying that Democratic support would be bad for Cobb’s re-election chances.
Cobb’s bill made it out of the Arizona state House, with mostly Democrats opposed. But after weeks of lobbyist pressure, HB 2005 was cut from a Senate committee agenda and didn’t receive a vote. Bills do not automatically carry over from one session to another in Arizona’s part-time legislature, so the whole process will have to start again next year for lawmakers who want to support the legislation.
But similar app store reform bills are still alive in New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, where there are full-time legislatures.
“They’re going to prepare for the same thing I went through originally,” Cobb says. “I think they just need to be aware of all that and have this in their mind before they start, because you just gotta be strong and look at it big picture-wise. I think that’s the problem that legislators have sometimes. It’s hard to look at the big picture when lobbyists come in and say, ‘This is why it shouldn’t be this way.’”
Cobb adds that she hopes that Arizona, along with North Dakota, can be an example for these other states and fellow state legislators to know what they’re up against when wanting to write legislation involving Big Tech companies.
