Ctrl + Shift + Power: How Big Tech Is Eroding People Power
Decisions, decisions, decisions.
Love them or hate them, we’ve got to make them. Whether it’s deciding where to eat for lunch or which president to vote for, our right to choose is the foundation of our participation in debates, markets, and democracy. Our nation was built on the notion that citizens are entitled to agency: the power, capacity, and freedom to make choices.
But this hasn’t been true for all Americans. For decades, communities of color in particular have been stripped of their agency by those in power: banks redlining Black communities out of homeownership, highway developers displacing vulnerable households with government-facilitated eminent domain, oil companies overwhelmingly siting polluting facilities in communities of color.
Today, there is a new, slightly less visible power broker dictating our access to agency: Big Tech. As we witness tech companies and their powerful CEOs become more and more entrenched in the public sector, we also witness a weakening of our decision-making powers. From tech billionaires interfering with our democratic elections, to automated decision-making tools determining our access to capital and wealth, our communities are steadily losing autonomy over some of life’s most important issues.
I Don’t Remember Voting For This
Over the past year, the tech industry has played a game of cat and mouse with our elected and government officials. After legislators attempted to regulate tech companies like Google for their use of local media content, the company dumped $10.7 million on lobbying in the state of California. When tech billionaires saw that their tax breaks were about to run out, they successfully lobbied for the most expensive, punitive budget bill in our nation’s history with tax breaks and carve outs built in just for them. At Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, tech CEOs like Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg were seated at the front row. Despite not being voted in by American citizens, these companies have exerted their wealth, influence, and power over our democratic systems.
In California, this power shift happened slowly, and then all at once.
In November of 2020, the majority of Californians voted in favor of Proposition 24, the California Privacy Rights Act, or CPRA. This act expanded consumer data privacy laws, allowing consumers to decide whether or not they wanted businesses to sell their personal information (think about the ‘Reject All Cookies’ notices you see each time you enter a website.) The CPRA also made it possible for consumers to opt out of being subject to automated decision-making tools — say, for example, you didn’t want your job application to be reviewed by artificial intelligence (AI) because you knew the risks that algorithmic bias could have on applicants with ‘Black-sounding’ names. The CPRA also created the California Privacy Protection Agency, a new regulatory agency imbued with the authority to enforce these rights.
The Agency underwent a rulemaking process to iron out the details of these new privacy rights. With every new draft, consumers, privacy advocates, and industry representatives shared their feedback through the public comment process. The Agency’s board members debated, deliberated, and engaged in good old-fashioned discourse until they came to a draft that appeased pretty much everyone involved.
That is, until tech CEOs caught wind of what was happening. They saw that these new protections would take a cut out of the profits they could generate from user analytics, targeted advertising, and price-fixing. So, the tech industry lobbyists made some calls.
Almost overnight, former Greenliner and board member Vinhcent Le was dumped from the Agency board. In a sweeping round of edits, the newly tech-empowered board changed the definition of ‘Automated Decision-Making Tool’ so that virtually no significant AI use cases would be covered by these protections. The CPRA was essentially gutted.
Greenlining submitted this comment letter to the Agency voicing opposition to these changes — but the new draft came mere months before the rulemaking was to be finalized. So far, none of the edits have been backed by any meaningful justification. Despite public outcry, the final rules are likely to remain favorable to the tech companies.
This is just one of the many examples of tech companies intervening outside of the democratic process to tip the scales in their favor, especially now with the emergence of AI. Just last month, Republican lawmakers in Congress tried to sneak an egregious 10-year moratorium on AI regulations into the Trump administration’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ that would prevent state lawmakers from enacting any responsible regulations on AI. In Colorado, tech companies killed the state’s trailblazing AI Act by taking the bill back to a special session and refusing to accept any proposed compromises.
Tech companies are coming in at the last second and bending rules in their favor with an ability that rivals that of any other corporate interest we’ve seen. This is happening at every level of our government. The amount of money concentrated in these corporations is unparalleled, and this influence threatens to erode the power of our democracy and decision-making power.
Move Fast and Break Things
As it turns out, lawmakers are buying what tech companies are selling. Across the nation, federal and state governments are racing to adopt AI. In July, President Donald Trump released his ‘anti-woke’ AI Action Plan to facilitate the integration of deregulated artificial intelligence into every federal agency. Last September, Governor Gavin Newsom released an Executive Order encouraging state agencies to use AI to tackle issues such as homelessness and housing.
These incentives are kickstarting a race among tech companies to develop the systems that can meet demand and secure government contracts. A race to innovate, however, results in disparate impacts for communities of color. Greenlining’s 2024 report “Building Fairer Futures: The Role of AI in Equitable Government Decision-Making” evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of various government AI systems. We find that these tools can perpetuate inequities by encoding historical disparities or biased data into their decision-making systems. For example, today in the state of California, inmates are assigned recidivism scores by COMPAS, an algorithm with a proven track record of racial bias. We also have evidence of applicants seeking out unemployment benefits being mistakenly marked for fraud by an AI risk assessment tool.
There are tangible interventions we can make to ensure these systems are not disproportionately harming communities of color. This can include robust risk assessments, high quality data standards, adverse event reporting mechanisms, disclosures and opt-out options, and community-informed stress-testing. California’s AB 1018, for example, would require AI developers to conduct disparate impact assessments for any tools that are responsible for high-risk decisions, including housing, healthcare, and employment.
In order for any of these to work, however, we need to know which AI tools are being used in the first place. That’s why Greenlining co-sponsored and passed AB 302 in 2023, requiring the California Department of Technology to create an inventory of high-risk automated decision-making tools used by the government.
But two years since the bill was signed and passed, this inventory still has not been created. State agencies claim that there is no need for them to comply because they apparently don’t use any high-risk AI tools. The evidence says otherwise. This is a deflection of responsibility that is intended to optimize for more – more unscrupulous use of automated decision-making tools, more demand for these tools to be produced quickly, and more potential for disparate impacts on communities of color.
While they’re moving fast and breaking things, our communities are the collateral damage.
Innovate to Advocate
We are reaching a new frontier in California and American politics. These corporate giants have learned how to play the game and, quite frankly, they’re beating us. Our federal regulatory agencies have been gutted and the ones that remain are under the beck and call of AI developers.
Advocates for communities of color, for privacy rights, for our climate, and for racial equity need to pivot. Unprecedented times call for unprecedented tactics. It’s time to take our demands to the companies themselves.
Back in April 2025, OpenAI announced they wanted to convert from a nonprofit into a for-profit company: one of the most powerful corporations of today’s world unabashedly denouncing its commitment to public good. Recognizing what was at stake, we joined 50 other organizations to call on the Attorney General to halt this conversion and take control of OpenAI’s charitable assets — assets they raised as a nonprofit.
We made noise, presented strong arguments, and went straight to the source: our organizations directly scrutinized OpenAI’s corporate governance structure and forced them to answer for their decision.
The campaign worked. With all these eyes on OpenAI, the company backtracked on its conversion. Advised by a commission of nonprofit leaders, OpenAI was pushed to create a $50 million fund to provide immediate and direct support to frontline community-based organizations.
As advocates, we need to be innovative in our tactics. We have less traditional regulatory tools to hold these tech companies accountable — the public comments aren’t enough anymore. In order to amplify our voice, we need to pull levers that trigger public pressure to curtail these tech companies’ ability to amass even more political power. Direct engagement, legal action, and community benefits agreements are all strategies that should be on the table.
We cannot willingly surrender our freedom to make decisions. Agency is a fundamental pillar of democracy, equity, and self-determination. We will not let our communities’ futures be determined by algorithms and lobby money. We must find new ways to innovate and advocate. The tech CEOs have flooded our soundwaves, now it’s time we flood theirs. It’s time to shift control and reclaim our power.
