Google Agrees to Change Business Practices to Resolve FTC Competition Concerns(ftc.gov)

  "If you want to get involved in business," Sen. Orrin Hatch 
  warned technology companies at a conference in 2000, "you 
  should get involved in politics."

  Hatch was referring to the shortcomings of then-software 
  king Microsoft, which he had spent most of the previous 
  decade harassing from his perch as Judiciary Committee 
  chairman. The message was clear: If you become successful, 
  you must hire lobbyists, you must start a political action 
  committee, and you must donate to politicians. Otherwise 
  Washington will make your life very difficult.

  Hatch's crusade against Microsoft was a formative moment in 
  the cozy relationship between K Street and Capitol Hill. 
  That coziness has become a prime target of the Tea Party in 
  recent years -- and so has Orrin Hatch, who faces a primary 
  Tuesday against conservative challenger Dan Liljenquist.
 
  Here's the Hatch-Microsoft story:

  The Clinton administration brought antitrust charges 
  against Microsoft after the Windows 95 operating system 
  came preloaded with Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer. 
  Though the case was in the hands of the Federal Trade 
  Commission and the courts, Hatch brought Microsoft CEO Bill 
  Gates before his Senate Judiciary Committee in 1998, and 
  gave him a good dressing down, ostensibly for being a 
  monopolist.

  But it grated on Hatch and other senators that Gates didn't 
  want to want to play the Washington game. Former Microsoft 
  employee Michael Kinsley, a liberal, wrote of Gates: "He 
  didn't want anything special from the government, except 
  the freedom to build and sell software. If the government 
  would leave him alone, he would leave the government 
  alone."

  This was a mistake. One lobbyist fumed about Gates to 
  author Gary Rivlin: "You look at a guy like Gates, who's 
  been arrogant and cheap and incredibly naive about 
  politics. He genuinely believed that because he was 
  creating jobs or whatever, that'd be enough."

  Gates was "cheap" because Microsoft spent only $2 million 
  on lobbying in 1997, and its PAC contributed less than 
  $50,000 during the 1996 election cycle.

  "You can't say, 'We're better than that,' " a Microsoft 
  lobbyist told me on Friday. "At some point, you get too 
  big, and you can't just ignore Washington."

  "You can sit there and say, 'We despise Washington and we 
  don't want to have anything to do with them,' " the 
  lobbyist said. "But guess what? We're going to have 
  hearings about the [stuff] you do."

  It's no shocker that lobbyists think companies should hire 
  lobbyists. But so does Capitol Hill -- Orrin Hatch 
  included.

  In a 2000 speech to technology companies, Hatch called 
  Microsoft "knuckle-headed and hard-nosed," according to 
  Wired magazine. "I have given [Microsoft] advice, and they 
  don't pay any attention to it." In that same speech, Hatch 
  warned: "If you want to get involved in business, you 
  should get involved in politics."

  "The industry had an attitude that government should do 
  what it needs to do but leave us alone," one Hill 
  technology staffer complained to Business Week at the time. 
  "Their hands-off approach to Washington will come back to 
  haunt them."