“There seems to be a sense in Silicon Valley that people are more idealistic…that’s not Michael.”
The Internet Association's Michael Beckerman (center) with Alexis Ohanian (right) on a panel in Lexington, KY, in October 2012.
Sean Patterson / Via webpronews.com
WASHINGTON — It's loud and cramped on the second-floor balcony of a bustling pizza place in D.C.'s Penn Quarter. You can barely hear Reddit's animated, gesticulating co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, over the sound of a sea of patrons dining below; through the din, it's almost as if he's mouthing his words. And you can barely even see the party's host, Michael Beckerman, the low-key former Republican staffer standing with his hands clasped and head bowed — a powerful new industry's new man in the capital.
"You're all living in a district that has tremendous influence in people's lives," Ohanian reminds the 30-odd partygoers in attendance. "It might not necessarily be you with the influence, but you could be sitting next to that person, and that means you all have a great responsibility."
He talks about traveling across the country and meeting young entrepreneurs. He talks about "meeting students who feel very personally about why the internet is so important." He asks — in fact, "all" he asks — is that we "give a damn." It's an idealistic speech and one Ohanian has practiced a lot; he motions for the crowd to come closer, but they don't budge. The crowd, comprising mainly internet activists and lobbyists, has heard it before.
What's new is that Ohanian and his allies atop even larger tech companies have begun to play the traditional Washington game of lobbying — buying and wheedling influence, playing both sides. That's Beckerman's job: He is the president and CEO of the Internet Association, the one-year-old lobbying organization for internet companies. The gathering, a book party sponsored by the Association for Ohanian's memoir-cum-entrepreurial-guidebook, Without Their Permission, is the latest in a series of cooperations between the two men. On the surface, the two are an unlikely pair — Ohanian the untucked, ruffle-haired Oscar to Beckerman's suit-clad, well-coiffed Felix — but nonetheless, here they are, together: the politician and his fixer, the career outsider and the consummate insider.
Eli Meir Kaplan
Formed in late 2012, with the backing of companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay, the Internet Association is the internet's unified — and severely belated — attempt to create a powerful trade and lobbying organization to distribute money and levy influence in Washington, much like TechNet, which formed in the late 1990s to represent technology issues in Congress. As long as there have been tech superpowers, there has been tech lobbying. But the new generation of tech companies — internet companies — has been somewhat averse to organizing. They see themselves as "disruptors," not players.
The Internet Association's foundation was laid in the wake of the attempted passages of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which resulted in a massive but disorganized lobbying effort by America's largest tech companies — and which mobilized Ohanian, then an otherwise occupied venture capitalist, as an activist.
Beckerman has the standard lobbyist résumé. He's a 12-plus-year veteran of Capitol Hill and a former senior staffer for both Republican congressman Fred Upton and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "I was on the Hill for PIPA and SOPA, and it became incredibly clear then that any wrong policy decision by the federal government could take all the work we've done to make the U.S. the center of innovation and end it just like that," he said in an interview.
Unlike Ohanian, whose caffeinated, bordering-on-goofy demeanor mimics that of a politician crossed with an idealistic undergraduate, Beckerman is a quiet professional with a business card and firm handshake always at the ready. He wears a fitted suit, but without a tie. Sitting with Beckerman last month in BuzzFeed's offices, he carefully straddled the line between Washington maneuverer and internet executive. He deftly sidestepped questions like a seasoned Hill staffer while making sure to distance himself just enough from his roots by touting the Association's "outside-the-Beltway approach" to lobbying.
"I've always viewed Michael as a fixer, if that makes sense," one former committee colleague told BuzzFeed. "There seems to be a sense in Silicon Valley that people are more idealistic and attack problems with broad brushstrokes, and that's not Michael. He sees a problem and likes to tackle it as efficiently as possible."
When I first met Beckerman, on the "Internet 2012" bus tour with Ohanian, he had just left his job at the Energy and Commerce committee, where, according to the 2010 Insider's Guide to Key Committee Staff , he was "helping the panel's Republican members implement their legislative policy agenda, with considerable emphasis on preventing the EPA from imposing greenhouse gas regulations." Around the time Beckerman moved to the committee, Ohanian's TED talk about how the "lesson of Mister Splashy Pants," a Reddit meme, "is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age," was going viral.
For the last year, this contrast has been mostly irrelevant. Both men have been making similar cases, just in different styles and using different Rolodexes. But in 2014, this will change. The Internet Association is about to start raising, and spending, money.
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