Google Refines its 50-State Lobby Strategy As Tech Fight Moves to States
Reporter Austin Ahlman delves into Google’s ramped up state-level lobbying efforts and surpassing of federal spending, trying to counter legislation like California’s CJPA and sway data privacy and media compensation laws nationwide.
The fight to make Big Tech safe for democracy is at a crossroads. Oversight efforts in a Republican-controlled Congress are uncertain at best. And while the incoming Trump White House may continue the antitrust cases the Biden administration has pursued against giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, there is a real possibility the new administration will attempt to settle those lawsuits under terms that do little to reduce the power or change the behavior of the corporations.
In the face of those uncertainties, many advocates have urged moving efforts to restructure and regulate Big Tech to the states. If and when they do so, they will find that at least one of the dominant corporations — Google — is waiting for them. While other tech giants like Meta are gradually increasing their state-level lobbying activities, Google in recent years has aggressively scaled up its operation.
Perhaps the most dramatic example is California, where the corporation’s third-quarter lobbying reports revealed that it had spent over $10 million on pressuring the state legislature to kill an ambitious piece of legislation called the California Journalism Protection Act, or CJPA. That bill would have created a permanent framework for Google and other platforms like Facebook to compensate news publishers for the value of their content — a move that would have cost Google tens of millions of dollars annually and established a model for other states.
Ultimately, Google secured a side deal with Governor Gavin Newsom and the legislature to create a journalism sustainability fund. The deal, which will require taxpayer support, appears to fall well short of the compensation publishers would have received had the CJPA passed.
With the California blitz, Google’s total lobbying expenditures at the state level in the 2024 calendar year are set to surpass its federal lobbying spending for the first time. But the increase in Google’s state-level spending was evident long before the corporation unleashed its full court effort to kill the CJPA earlier this year.
In 2023, the corporation spent nearly $1.6 million opposing that bill and other data privacy reforms in their early stages, during the first half of California’s two-year legislative session. That figure represented a three-fold increase from the roughly half million dollars the corporation spent on similar activities during each of the prior two years.
Other states pursuing legislation that could affect Google’s business model have seen similarly rapid increases in lobbying spending. In Maryland, one of several states which passed or considered a comprehensive consumer data privacy law earlier this year, Google’s annual lobbying spend ballooned to over $600,000 in the reporting year that ended last month, an amount that dwarfs the less than $100,000 the corporation spent on similar activities the previous calendar year. (Meta also spent over half a million dollars lobbying in Maryland during the last 12 months.) Unlike in California, Maryland reformers and citizens ultimately triumphed, as Governor Wes Moore signed the Maryland Kids Code and the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act of 2024 into law in May.
Even in states where the passage of major reforms seem unlikely due to legislative deadlock, like Pennsylvania, Google’s lobbying spending has seen a noticeable uptick. Control over the Keystone state’s senate and house is split between the two parties, which has limited the odds of passing substantial reforms. Even so, Google nearly doubled its lobbying expenditures in the last four quarters to over $140,000 compared to the less than $86,000 it spent the previous year.This article
was featured in The Corner Newsletter: December 06, 2024.
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