“You and your policies are really helping a lot” – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

“Thank you for being such a pro-business and pro-innovation president…We’re very excited to see what you’re doing to make all of our companies and our entire country so successful” – OpenAI Sam Altman

“We’re making it really easy for you…getting you electric power, getting your permits for you” – President Trump

 

These executives at Big Tech companies were just a few of the many present at a gold-heavy dinner hosted by President Trump last month where they all took turns complimenting the President vociferously. This was a clear representation of the cozy relationship between the White House and the most extractive and manipulative parts of the tech industry. Tech companies continuing their goal of becoming “too big to fail” at all costs are a perfect match with an administration that wants more compliments, more money, more power, and more surveillance — and neither seem to care whom they hurt in the process. 

Fighting commonsense regulation at the state and federal levels, defanging the cops on the consumer protection beat, maximizing commercial surveillance, rushing out to give precious public land to Big Tech for dirty data center development, handing out billions in federal contracts, publishing and promoting the tech industry’s dream “AI Action Plan,” and picking fights with other countries over digital taxes on massive private companies are just a few of the gifts the administration has given big tech over the last 9 months. 

They even gave military honors and status to execs at big technology companies Meta, Palantir, and OpenAI,  a status normally reserved for folks who spend decades serving in the military. Concerns of stolen valor aside, it’s indicative of the lengths the administration is going through to prioritize these companies over people. 

This post documents some of the many initiatives between the tech companies and the Trump administration  aimed at padding the bottom line of billion dollar corporations that have been exploiting  our privacy for their gain over many years. In past years, any one of these could yield a significant news cycle. These moves make it all the more urgent to pass meaningful and actionable privacy laws, controls on how AI is being rolled out, protections for communities where data centers are being shoved, and more. More than ever, privacy and AI laws need private rights of action, which would allow consumers to sue these companies for violations of the law that harm them.

Big Tech companies have gone above and beyond to provide financial and reputational benefit to the administration:

• Apple removed apps from the app store that allowed upon request by the Department of Justice. (CNN)
• Meta removes Facebook group that shared information about the whereabouts of ICE invasions in people’s communities upon request by the Department of Justice. (New York Times) 
  • Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg had previously (after Trump won) complained heavily about how inappropriate this type of pressure from the government was when Biden had been president. (Axios) 
• Tech leaders from Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Ring, Blue Origin, Palantir, Google, Apple, OpenAI, Micron, and Figma joined Donald Trump in a dinner where they each took turns fawning over the President. (Sherwood News)
• Tech moguls Altman, Bezos and Zuckerberg each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. (NPR)
  • Senators sent letters to each tech CEO who donated large sums to the Trump campaign; the letters, raise concern about the tech industry’s influence on the administration. U.S. Senate
• Big Tech companies, including Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir, quietly sponsored Trump’s military parade party. (The Verge)
• Meta paid Trump $25 million in settlement money for shutting down his accounts after the January 6th attack on the Capitol. (Axios)
• Google paid $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit over Trump’s account suspension around the January 6th attack on the Capitol. (AP News)
• Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, while Apple was the subject of a DOJ antitrust suit, as well as over 20 open National Labor Relations Board cases related to unfair labor practices. (Variety)
• Google, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, was found by a federal court to have an illegal monopoly over the online search market. (Politico)
• Amazon, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, is the subject of multiple ongoing regulatory actions, including multiple Federal Trade Commission (FTC) suits related to anti-consumer and anticompetitive practices, a Department of Justice (DOJ)… (The Guardian)
• Similar to Meta, Twitter (since purchased by Elon Musk and renamed X) banned Donald Trump from the platform after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In February, Trump settled a lawsuit against X for $10 million, with a portion of the money set to go toward Trump’s presidential library. (NPR)
• Uber donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, along with an additional $1 million from Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. The company is the subject of an ongoing FTC investigation for predatory practices. (The Guardian)

And the Administration is going above and beyond to help tech companies maximize profit and influence:

• Moves to deregulate and defang consumer protections, including:

• • Directing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to review all investigations commenced under the previous administration to ensure that they do not “advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation. Furthermore, reviewing all FTC final orders, consent decrees, and injunctions, and, where appropriate, seeking to modify or set aside any that unduly burden AI innovation.” (AI Action Plan) These likely include cases on facial recognition,fake review machines, dangerous data broker profilers, and more.
  • Dropping the FTC’s surveillance pricing Request For Information amidst rising costs and use of surveillance pricing. (RetailBrew)
  • Attempting to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helped protect consumers from myriad data abuses. (NPR)
  • Officially urging big tech companies not to comply with European consumer protection law, even when they operate in Europe. (WIRED) 
  • Pushing for a moratorium of all state regulation of AI. (MLex)
    • Empowering the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and directing them to evaluate whether state AI regulations interfere with the agency’s ability to carry out its obligations and authorities under the Communications Act of 1934. (AI Action Plan)
  • Firing the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) commissioners, who helped protect consumers from shoddy and dangerous products on online marketplaces. Efforts to kill the CPSC came shortly after Amazon sued the agency for attempting to hold them responsible. (Politico and AP News)
  • Firing commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) who worked to enforce consumer protection and antitrust measures in the tech industry. The Supreme Court upheld these firings, abandoning a 90-year-old precedent that protected independent federal agencies from arbitrary presidential action.  (PBS)
  • Firing the Copyright Office director two days after publication of a measured report on AI and copyright that conflicts with the tech oligarchs’ agenda. (NPR)
  • Establishing regulatory sandboxes, or AI Centers of Excellence, around the country where researchers, startups, and established enterprises can rapidly deploy and test AI tools with no fear of any enforcement actions when the law is broken. (AI Action plan)
• International influence:
  • The State Department spent months pressuring Gambia to support Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet business, even threatening to halt important U.S. aid projects in the country. (ProPublica)
  • The President brokered a $20 billion investment in AI, the purpose of which remains unclear, from Saudi Arabia. (BBC/NYT)
• Financial enrichment and support: 
  • Trump pushed to adopt Project Stargate – a $500 billion investment in private AI development – in a joint press event with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. (Forbes)
  • Coordinating the White House, federal agency, and tech company coordination to “ensure access to large-scale computing power for startups and academics by improving the financial market for compute.” (AI Action Plan)
  • Palantir secured several contracts throughout the administration to supercharge profiling and mass surveillance from across the internet in opaque ways (WIRED)
  • The Army agreed on a $10 billion contract with Palantir as part of the administration’s plan to improve efficiency, while DOGE fired government workers and cut essential programs. (CNBC)
  • Meta and Anduril won defense contracts to inundate the military with surveillance tech. Meta’s contract was secured even after the company was tied to disinformation scandals and confirmed that its services were used by international violent extremists. (CNBC)
  • The Defense Department awarded OpenAI a one-year $200 million defense contract “to address national security challenges.” (CNBC)
• Environmental: 
  • The Department of Energy (DOE) announced a plan to “fast-track” data centers on federal land across the country. (DOE) This initiative would…
    • Establish new Categorical Exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to cover data center-related actions, As part of this, they are claiming these data centers “dont have significant environmental impact,” which is not true. 
    • Expand the use of fast-tracking processes for the maximum number of data center creation projects. 
    • Explore the need for a nationwide Clean Water Act Section 404 permit for data centers, and, if adopted, ensure that this permit does not require a Pre-Construction Notification and covers development sites consistent with the size of a modern AI data center. Additionally, DOE would expedite environmental permitting by streamlining or reducing regulations promulgated under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, and other relevant related law.  
    • Make Federal lands available for data center construction and the construction of power generation infrastructure for those data centers by directing agencies with significant land portfolios to identify sites suited to large-scale development.