Unfortunately, a lot of lobbying these days is done in self-defense. This is a good article on how the politicians corrupted Microsoft and turned it into a lobbying machine. Congress will threaten you with banning your business or passing laws that favor competitors unless you grease their pockets.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/carney-how-hatch-forced-micros...

"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."