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The United States: birthplace of the big tech lobby playbook

Big Tech’s influence on the US government is long-standing. The companies have often been pushing on an open door, especially under the Obama administration. Only Biden took a different approach, promoting robust antitrust efforts and digital trade policies. Yet whatever limited progress there was has already been undone by the current Trump administration.

Indeed, Trump has gone full tilt in the opposite direction and has embraced Silicon Valley’s biggest names with open arms. The level of entanglement between the president and a specific corporate sector, exemplified by the power initially given to Elon Musk, is unprecedented.

The entanglements are deep, financial, and offer a handful of US Big Tech companies access to political power at the highest level in the world’s largest economy. In a country whose political donation system has been described as legalised corruption, Big Tech’s relationship with the Trump administration has taken political influence to a whole new level.

Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Uber each donated USD one million to Trump’s inauguration fund, a coordinated show of loyalty from companies seeking continued deregulation and wishing to use US state power to advance their interests abroad. Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google also contributed to President Trump’s new White House ballroom.

Meanwhile, regulatory enforcement against the tech sector is collapsing. According to a 2025 report by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the current Trump administration has halted or withdrawn one-third of all investigations into alleged misconduct by Big Tech, effectively granting immunity to companies facing mounting antitrust, labour, consumer-protection, and privacy cases.

The stakes increased with the advancement of AI. Corporate lobbying on AI issues in the US skyrocketed in 2024, according to the US non-profit OpenSecrets, which monitors money in American politics. A dominant theme of this lobbying has been to prevent or reduce the regulation of AI developments. And, at least at the federal level, it has worked. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, released in July 2025, openly prioritised stripping away what it calls red tape or onerous regulation.

This lobbying success, in the US and elsewhere, has been massively enabled by a narrative framing that ties the economic fortunes of AI companies with those of states or entire regions.

Establishing the narrative: “Keep California leading the AI Race”...In early 2025, members of the California State Assembly introduced AB 1018 Automated Decision Systems, a draft law that would require AI systems used in employment, housing, and other critical areas to be tested for bias and discrimination. The bill was debated during the 2025 legislative session, but voting was delayed(opens in new window)  after a coordinated industry pushback.

We talked to Samantha Gordon, Chief Advocacy Officer at TechEquity, a non-profit based in California, to unpack the lobbying tactics used by Big Tech as AB-1018 was debated.

Big Tech’s opposition to the Automated Decisions Safety Act bill leveraged a geopolitical narrative that the industry has become adept at using to push back on AI regulation. It’s a simple storyline – the US and its companies must dominate in technology, and particularly in AI, if the US is to retain global economic dominance. Often framed as a “race to win”, it pits countries like the US against geopolitical rivals like China. Regulation is then framed as an obstacle. Gordon explains: “We always hear Big Tech companies say: ‘We need to win the AI race’, so any safeguards you might put in place get treated as hurdles”.

The sports metaphor is powerful, as is the framing of Big Tech and AI as crucial for the future economic success of nations. The conversation gets shifted away from the harmful impacts of Big Tech products and how regulations can protect the public. Public interest regulation is recast as an existential threat to US economic hegemony. Moreover, as other articles in this series show, it provides the basis not only for Big Tech’s influence on US regulation but also for the US argument against the regulation of US tech giants worldwide.

Blocking AI safeguards state by state...The narrative that pits regulation against innovation, and innovation as synonymous with national economic success, is one of the main prongs of Big Tech’s lobbying strategy. Opposition to California’s AB 1018 converged on a single message: the bill would stifle innovation and ban useful technologies. In reality, Gordon stressed, “the bill did not prohibit the use of any technology. It simply required developers to test their systems for discrimination and required users to disclose when they were using automated decision tools”.

But the impact of this carefully crafted narrative is made possible by the sheer number of voices amplifying the message. Gordon described the scene in California’s Capitol rotunda during the final days of the 2025 legislative session. “There must have been a hundred people working the floor”, she recalled. “And I counted. Half of them were there just to kill one bill: Automated Decisions Safety Act”.

Lobbyists working directly for the Big Tech companies were augmented by trade associations and other industry-funded bodies, such as TechNet and the Business Software Alliance. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and OpenAI are all members of TechNet, while BSA membership includes Microsoft and OpenAI.

The California Chamber of Commerce, representing California employers from a range of sectors, including Big Tech, also mobilised heavily. The Chamber coordinated opposition from the tech sector and industries that use automated decision systems, including insurance, advertising, and finance. The increasingly ubiquitous nature of automated systems across business sectors means that Big Tech’s interests increasingly become those of many other corporations.

As Gordon notes: “Big Tech scares legislators into believing that the legislation will hinder the ability to do business, hinder the ability to provide healthcare, and hinder the ability to provide loans. And it’s frankly very dishonest what they do because there’s no real accountability about how much manipulation goes into these messages and how many lies there are.”

But it works because it amplifies a message and drowns out the alternative views. During the debates over AB 1018, the California Chamber of Commerce launched a public campaign targeting state officials with digital ads and YouTube videos. The campaign asked the officials to “Keep California leading the AI race”.

Trading influence: weaponising US trade policy...Big business has long leveraged trade policy to promote its interests in foreign markets. But Big Tech’s influence on US trade policy is in a league of its own, particularly under the current Trump administration. Silicon Valley firms have blatantly merged their lobbying muscle with the geopolitical power of the US government to export a deregulation agenda.

We talked to Rishabh Bailey, Research Director at Public Citizen for the Digital Trade Alliance, a global collaborative of digital rights and consumer organisations, to unpack how Big Tech leverages US trade policy as a lobbying tool.

While the California legislature and US federal trade policy are very different arenas, the tactics tech companies use to advance their interests are strikingly similar. First, build a self-serving narrative, then ensure it is widely amplified through a network of funded entities, such as trade associations or ostensibly independent think tanks. The main difference lies in how receptive the Trump administration has been to this lobbying.

When Bailey began tracking Big Tech’s influence on trade policy, he saw a pattern that connects Silicon Valley boardrooms, Washington, D.C. agencies, and trade ministries around the world. According to Bailey, executives from Meta, Google and X (formerly Twitter) have direct lines to the Trump White House that have often triggered immediate policy responses, including public tariff threats issued via presidential tweets.

Crying “discrimination” to push deregulation worldwide...The narrative Big Tech has used to push the US government to promote its interests abroad is that other countries’ efforts to regulate it are anti-American and discriminatory. And while the US has long treated foreign regulations affecting Big Tech, such as digital services taxes(opens in new window) , as barriers to US tech companies, under the second Trump administration, Big Tech’s “anti-American” line played straight into the Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda. The result is the weaponisation of tariffs to attack other countries’ digital regulations.

Just after Trump took office, Meta’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, signalled that his company would work with the administration to push back against governments that impose rules on American tech firms. In April 2025, when the European Commission fined Meta EUR 200 million for violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Meta framed the penalty as a multi-billion-dollar tariff. The Trump administration immediately echoed this framing, declaring that extraterritorial regulations targeting American companies would be treated as trade barriers.

Bailey observed that a key event was Trump’s April 2025 executive order on reciprocal tariffs, which forced countries to the negotiating table, at which point the US could push hard to weaken or remove digital regulations that US tech firms claim disadvantage them. As Bailey put it, “the reciprocal tariffs were being implemented by Trump, his administration has been really clear that they want other countries to deregulate the technology space”.

Public Citizen found that Big Tech-funded trade associations pushed the Trump administration to target anti-monopoly laws, data protection, and taxes across 65 jurisdictions. The impacts of this coercive US approach are already visible. India removed its equalisation levy on digital advertising by non-resident enterprises, a tax the US had repeatedly criticised as discriminatory against US firms. Canada  withdrew its digital services tax to secure broader trade negotiations with the US, a move that Big Tech immediately welcomed.

The US was particularly concerned by European legislation, as were the tech companies, for whom the EU is a highly lucrative market. On the sidelines of official trade negotiations, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick(opens in new window)  told the press that if the EU wanted lower tariffs on steel and aluminium exports, it would have to drop its digital rules.

To take advantage of the heightened receptiveness of the current Trump administration to the narrative of “discrimination against American companies”, Big Tech can rely on a veritable army of voices that agree with them. Many took direct aim at the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta, described the DMA as a trade tariff that targets US companies. The US Chamber of Commerce called the DMA “de facto discrimination against US-headquartered companies”. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), supported by companies including Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, argued that the DMA “explicitly targets large US tech companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft) with selective criteria that protect European firms”. This was echoed by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), whose members  include Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta, which called the DMA “deeply flawed” and claimed that it disproportionally targets US tech companies.

In December 2025, the US Congress hosted a hearing titled “Anti-American Antitrust” on the impact of the DMA and other related legislation. In it, two speakers associated with the think-tank International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) depicted the DMA as a discriminatory, non-tariff attack on US companies. 50 academics and experts in digital markets, law and policy labelled the statements “misleading and, in large parts, factually false”. ICLE is funded by Amazon and Meta, but that was not disclosed in the written testimonies. [See more about them in the India case.]

This “discrimination” logic collapses under examination. As Bailey noted, digital markets worldwide are dominated by US corporations. When regulators target the biggest players, they inevitably target US firms because those firms hold monopolistic power.

But while the logic does not hold up, there is no denying the effectiveness of the lobbying. By capturing US trade policy, Big Tech has acquired an additional tool with which to lobby abroad.

What sets the US apart: unprecedented scale and access...The battles around California’s Automated Decisions Safety Act and the capture of US trade policy expose three core pillars of Big Tech’s lobby playbook: setting the narrative in ways that make corporate interests the same as national – usually economic – interests; dominating policymaking spaces via a network of lobbyists, industry bodies, and think-tanks which create the effect of broad opposition to regulation; leveraging the power of the world’s largest economy, the US, to augment their lobbying positions globally.

Many of these are standard corporate tactics. What sets Big Tech’s US strategy apart is the immense size of its lobbying resources and its unparalleled enmeshment with the Trump administration.

by: Margarida Silva(https://www.linkedin.com/in/margarida-silva-87545645/) and Misa Norigami(https://www.linkedin.com/in/misa-norigami/)