To avoid problems such as antitrust investigations, Apple spent more than $9.4 million on lobbying in the United States last year, an increase of 44 percent over the same period last year.

CTOnews.com, January 24 (Xinhua) in order to avoid restrictions on antitrust, online privacy, taxation, content restrictions, climate change and other issues, and to lobby for policies that benefit the company, Apple spends a lot of money every year lobbying U.S. officials to reduce related risks by building good government-business relations.

The latest figures show that Apple has just increased its spending on lobbying in 2022, with total lobbying spending of $9.4 million last year (currently about 63.732 million yuan), an increase of 44% compared with 2021. It set a new record for lobbying by the company.

Apple spent $6.5 million lobbying policymakers in 2021 (currently about 44.07 million yuan) and $6.7 million in 2020 (currently about 45.426 million yuan). But Apple still spends less on lobbying than Microsoft and Google, which invested $9.8 million (currently about 66.444 million yuan) and $10.9 million (about 73.902 million yuan) in 2022, respectively.

CTOnews.com learned that Amazon tops the list with $19.7 million (currently about 134 million yuan), while Meta ranks second with $19.2 million (currently about 130 million yuan). Amazon's spending is up about 2 per cent compared with 2021, while Meta is down 4.6 per cent.

Together, the five tech giants spent nearly $69 million (currently about 468 million yuan) lobbying the federal government last year, an increase of 5 per cent from 2021.