Yahoo reviewed its connection to ALEC quite fast

Sep 25, 2014 07:05 GMT  ·  By

Yahoo has finally joined the list of companies that are fleeing from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) after Google and Facebook took similar steps in the past few days.

Yesterday, Yahoo hadn’t yet decided about leaving ALEC just yet. “At Yahoo, we engage in the political process in a variety of ways to promote and to protect the long-term interests of our users and our company. One of the ways we do so is through memberships in organizations that help advance our business objectives. We may not agree with all the positions of an organization, its leaders or its supporters,” a Yahoo spokesperson told Softpedia at the time.

They added, however, that they periodically review the organizations with which they participate. It seems that it took the company about 12 hours to review this particular partnership.

“We’ve decided to discontinue our membership in ALEC. We periodically review our membership in organizations and, at this time, we will no longer participate in the ALEC Task Force on Communications and Technology,” a Yahoo spokesperson told Softpedia via email just a few hours ago.

The company most likely figured that it wasn’t worth all the bad PR it was going to receive from staying in ALEC for much longer, especially given all the attention shown by the media to the controversial lobbying group.

Tech companies are fleeing from ALEC

Facebook has announced its departure from ALEC just the other day, saying that it would likely not be renewing their membership in 2015. Google’s Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and former CEO, said that the company would no longer be connected to ALEC, which was a mistake in the first place, and said they were liars for outright denying that climate change was an issue.

Microsoft, who was part of the same Communications and Technology Task Force within ALEC, left a few months ago.

The American Legislative Executive Council has some extreme views about some important issues. For instance, it doesn’t agree with the concept of Net Neutrality, which is most certainly due to all the telcos that are part of the group – Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, for example.

Then, it claims that global warming is beneficial for the planet, despite all the scientific proof against such a claim. ALEC even wanted to have schools teach skepticism about climate change when it doesn’t outright deny that it is a problem. Once more, the interests of all the oil companies that are part of ALEC seem to come first and not the future of the planet.