Lobbying in the EU is not the same as lobbying in the US. In the EU, lobbying is simply being an advocate group that is consulted whenever issues in their domain arise, with everyone understanding their partiality.
Oh well that sounds a lot better. In fact better than letting old, out of touch politicians who understand nothing about the issue make all the decisions.
While I agree with the statement that lobbyists are not inherently evil, I will call this out as an overly optimistic statement.
We have cases like Ylva Johannson trying to enforce the use of AI detection algorithms for CSAM after being thoroughly consulted by Thorn, a company that sells such algorithms (who spent $24M on this). Meanwhile, she never met with digital rights lobbyists despite them repeatedly asking for a meeting.
