February 29th, 2008
Vonage spent nearly $1.4 million to lobby Feds in 2007
The Associated Press reports that Vonage spent nearly $1.4 million to lobby the federal government in 2007.
Vonage’s key lobbying activities were related to telecommunications competition and consumer issues.
That’s according to a disclosure form posted online Feb. 13 by the Senate’s public records office.
You are looking at selected portions of the form at the top of this post:
Much of the need to lobby seems to be directly mappable back to issues raised in several patent disputes Vonage participated in last month, as well as in 2007.
Specifically, the AP notes that in January, Vonage settled litigation with Nortel Networks, the latest in a series of multimillion-dollar patent settlements with traditional telecommunications companies. Last year, the Holmdel, N.J.-based company agreed to pay AT&T Inc. $39 million to settle a patent suit. Vonage also settled lawsuits with Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. for a total of $200 million in 2007.
According to its most recent filing, Vonage spent more than $601,000 in the second half of the year lobbying on those issues.
Under a U.S. Federal law enacted in 1995, lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could influence members of the executive and legislative branches.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
