GeekPAC

According to this story, Florida’s open standards legislation has been thwarted. The allegation in the article centers around a heavy Microsoft lobbying effort that managed to thwart the open standards language in 24 hours. It’s important to note the differences between California’s (and other states’, for that matter) efforts and Florida’s. California AB 1668 is an openly proposed bill that will go through the standard legislative process - go before committee, get approved (or not), then move on (or not). In the case of Florida, there is a bill to create “an Agency for Enterprise Information Technology within the Executive Office of the Governor.” Representative Ed Homan added the open standards language to the bill as quietly as possible so as to avoid undue publicity that might prematurely wreck the bill - it backfired. What ended up happening is that Microsoft lobbyists sniffed out the language and lobbied for the removal of Rep. Homan’s amendments.
This is not to say that AB 1668 won’t succumb to the efforts of lobbyists, but it will be more difficult to dislodge the bill, and it certainly won’t happen in 24 hours. Now that the bill is through the first committee, the scrutiny of the process will only grow.