DIGITAL LIFE

How lobbying sustains the power of big tech companies worldwide

Could Regulating Big Tech Lead to Censorship of the Bible in Brazil? Is Tony Blair quietly promoting Oracle's AI in the Global South? Which politicians are lobbying on behalf of Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos around the world?

We already know that the concentration of money and power in Big Tech companies, coupled with hermetically sealed algorithms, leaves a trail of victims ranging from access to reliable information to natural resources. Yet, little is said about the force that sustains the political and economic dominance of these tech giants: lobbying.

According to its financial report, Alphabet, Google's parent company, had revenues of US$350 billion in 2024, almost equivalent to Chile's GDP. Last year, Amazon amassed US$638 billion in sales, almost a third of Brazil's GDP.

With so much money, the bargaining power of Big Tech companies is significant in less developed regions. In places like Brazil, lobbying is not regulated, which makes it more difficult to track these actions and measure how much influence they have on laws passed in Congress.

“Deputies sent me messages reporting physical threats and threats on social media (…) Big Tech companies have crossed all limits of prudence,” said the then-president of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira (PP-AL), in 2023, when Congress was trying to approve Bill 2630, to regulate the tech giants. The text became known as the Fake News Bill.

Lira promised to hold Big Tech companies accountable for what he defined as “an almost horrific act in the lives of deputies in the week leading up to the vote.” Faced with the pressure, meticulously reconstructed in one of the more than 20 articles in the investigative series The Invisible Hand of Big Tech, the bill ended up being shelved.

The influence of Big Tech lobbying motivated Agência Pública, from Brazil, to join forces with the Latin American Center for Journalistic Research (CLIP) to lead an unprecedented transnational investigation. The Invisible Hand of Big Tech brought together 17 journalistic organizations from 13 countries—from Mexico to Australia—to try to understand the power of these corporations in today's world.

Databases systematize the relationship between lobbying and politics...In Europe, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle, donated US$130 million between 2021 and 2023 to the Tony Blair Institute (TBI). “When it comes to technology policy, the role of the TBI is to enter developing economies and sell Ellison's technologies. Oracle and TBI are inseparable,” said a former senior advisor from the United Kingdom, one of the 29 sources interviewed for the report on the institute.

When the Labor Party, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and of which Blair was a key leader, returned to power in 2024, TBI employees began to occupy direct government positions while receiving TBI salaries. In the United States, Ellison was dubbed the "CEO of everything" by Donald Trump after the Republican's return to the White House in 2025.

Ellison's donations helped TBI employ nearly a thousand people in at least 45 countries. The institute's revenue in the last fiscal year was approximately US$145.3 million. A former employee said the influx of money made the internal culture "extremely toxic," while others described a blind optimism regarding AI that pushes the boundaries of lobbying in favor of Oracle.

In Ethiopia, on the brink of civil war in 2020, TBI was working on an AI public policy proposal advocating for the introduction of autonomous cars. The TBI told journalists investigating the matter that it does not represent Oracle's commercial interests. Oracle and the Larry Ellison Foundation declined to comment.

But Tony Blair is not the only former head of government to act in favor of a tech giant.

In Brazil, Google hired former president Michel Temer (2016–2019) to strengthen its lobby against regulation. In 2023, when Congress attempted to pass the Fake News Bill, executives from Google and Telegram were investigated by the Federal Police for pressuring parliamentarians to vote against the text. On behalf of Google, Temer acted as an intermediary in the negotiations throughout the process.

Meanwhile, Big Tech companies also allied themselves with the far right to block regulatory efforts. In Congress, conservative deputies spread the idea that passages from the Bible would be banned in Brazil with regulation. The document that fabricated this false connection was conceived by a lobbyist from Meta and distributed by a lobbying entity representing Amazon, Meta, Google, Kwai, and TikTok.

Critics of the project also organized demonstrations in defense of freedom of expression. One of them took place at Brasília Airport. But the investigation found strong evidence that the protest was linked to lobbying groups.

Journalism in the wake of lobby victims...Lobbying also intervenes in the use of news content by Big Tech companies, which need journalism to train algorithms, AI, and social networks. Meta and Google, in particular, have put together a kind of manual to block remuneration for journalism in Canada, Australia, and Brazil.

The strategy includes strengthening ties with the press, promoting lavish events, making private agreements with large media outlets ("divide and conquer"), and turning public opinion against the media. In any country that has tried to legislate on the relationship between news sites and digital platforms, Richard Gingras, former vice president of news at Google, appeared to argue that the laws were misguided and that Alphabet defends a free internet.

His presence in various countries reveals the extent of Google's influence. In the first half of 2023 alone, he spoke with Brazilian journalists at a closed event in São Paulo, appeared on seven monitors during testimony to a parliamentary committee in Canada, and spoke to journalists in Taipei.

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘manual.’ That’s a very structured term. But we’re not completely stupid. If you’re hit with a club multiple times, you learn to dodge,” Gingras said in an interview for the series The Invisible Hand of Big Tech.

The Conversation Brazil