[CTC] Trump Is Big Tech’s Personal Lobbyist

[Arthur Stamoulis]

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-07-24-trump-big-techs-personal-lobbyist/

*Trump Is Big Tech’s Personal Lobbyist*

The administration is working hard to eliminate taxes and regulations on
Silicon Valley firms—even in other countries.



*BY DAVID DAYEN <https://prospect.org/topics/david-dayen/>    *

 *JULY 24, 2025*



During the debate over the GOP mega-bill, Big Tech firms led a radical
attempt to shield themselves from oversight. They pitched a ten-year
moratorium on state regulations on artificial intelligence, which would be
implemented through a kind of blackmail: The only way for states to receive
certain federal grants (initially for information technology upgrades but
eventually tied to broadband funding) would be to agree to the moratorium.
The goal was a hands-off environment for the AI rollout, benefiting the
biggest companies in tech.

Once word got out about this upending of state sovereignty, lawmakers
vociferously rejected it. The Senate took a vote on the provision, and it
was opposed 99-1, a degree of unanimity you pretty much never see in
today’s Congress. That was supposed to be that—until the Trump
administration just went ahead and gave the industry their wish anyway.

Buried in the White House AI Action Plan
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf>
released
on Wednesday is a recommendation to “accelerate AI innovation” by requiring
any federal agency with control of discretionary funding grants to
“consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions and
limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the
effectiveness of that funding or award.” This is a recapitulation of the AI
regulation moratorium, again using federal funding to force states into
compliance with a laissez-faire regime for AI.

In addition, the action plan fast-tracks AI data center permitting,
encourages replacing federal government functions with AI (which is happening
rapidly
<https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/tracking-uses-of-ai-in-the-trump-administration/>),
and weakens oversight for AI procurement. Public Citizen co-president Rob
Weissman called it “an AI plan written by Big Tech.”

Donald Trump and JD Vance came to power long on rhetoric about cutting down
the power and influence of the tech industry. As I write this, Meta, Apple,
Amazon, and Google are still formally being sued by the federal government.
Trump’s Federal Trade Commission litigated the trial against Meta in the
spring, and Google has twice been found guilty of monopolization, with
Trump’s Justice Department pursuing a breakup in the remedy phase.

Yet there is far more evidence that Trump and Vance are happily doing the
bidding of the biggest tech firms, while claiming to be adversaries. You
see it in the friendliness toward AI, which Google and Microsoft and Meta
are certainly thrilled about. You also see it in how *the Trump
administration is using its clout all over the world to force other
governments to take down their sovereign laws that impact Big Tech. Any
more of this and Trump and Vance might have to register as personal
lobbyists for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.*

*Back in June, Canada struck down its digital services tax
<https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/06/canada-rescinds-digital-services-tax-to-advance-broader-trade-negotiations-with-the-united-states.html>
in
order to facilitate trade negotiations with the U.S. Canadian Prime
Minister Mark Carney has said in recent days that there was little chance
at success
<https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/world/canada/carney-trade-deal-trump.html>
in
these trade negotiations, yet that tax remains rescinded. The policy was a
3 percent tax on revenues from digital services provided to Canadians, only
on companies with significant revenues. It would have cost the biggest tech
firms a cumulative $3 billion, which is really a flyspeck in the ocean of
Big Tech profits. But the precedent was set: Trump will try to intimidate
anyone daring to hurt his pals in Silicon Valley.*

*This strategy is being replicated around the world. As trade negotiations
move forward in advance of an August 1 deadline, The Wall Street Journal
<https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-trade-talks-tech-industry-e1061e53>
reports
that digital trade is taking center stage, targeting both taxes and
regulations. The administration is asking Brazil, South Korea, and the
European Union to change their digital rules as a condition of making a
deal. Already, it has gotten Indonesia to drop tariffs on software
downloads and India to postpone a digital services tax.*

This is rich for a lot of reasons. First of all, the rationale for Trump’s
tariffs is that we must close the large U.S. trade deficit in goods. But
tech profits abroad come from *services*, which are not put into the
administration’s equations. In fact, the U.S. has a surplus in trade in
services, in large part because of these digital services. Nevertheless,
the White House is trying to solve the trade deficit in goods by trying to
strike down alleged barriers for trade in services, which aren’t even real
barriers. In actuality, it’s a play to make tech firms more money.

Second, *the entire populist critique of trade is that, in the hands of
neoliberals, trade became an excuse to advance the interests of large
corporations. A decade ago, I wrote a feature for the Prospect
<https://prospect.org/labor/fast-track-corporate-wish-list/> about this
corporate misuse of trade, particularly by forcing countries to give up
their sovereignty through building into trade deals policies on labor or
the environment or other “non-tariff barriers” that companies could never
get through a legislature. So here we have the allegedly populist Trump
administration just doing unpaid lobbying services for the largest
corporations in the world. Way to stick it to the globalists!*

*The tech industry, incidentally, invented the concept of digital trade
<https://prospect.org/power/2023-04-18-big-tech-lobbyists-took-over-washington/>,
sold it to government officials, and bent the trade landscape toward their
interests. The Trump administration, in this sense, doesn’t represent a
break with the corporate-driven trade status quo, but total continuity.*

There’s also the point that the very companies benefiting from the U.S.
trying to cancel their taxes overseas have been repeatedly found to hide
software and intellectual-property profits in overseas tax shelters
<https://www.ibtimes.com/eu-shuts-down-tax-loopholes-it-targets-google-apple-amazon-facebook-2283872>.
It’s revealing that the only real excuse in the *Journal* story is that
Trump has always tried to stop overseas taxes on U.S. companies. So the
excuse is that he’s always been in the tank for Big Tech. OK.

The AI action plan demonstrates that the Trump administration has been very
friendly to Big Tech inside our borders too, even at the agencies that are
allegedly getting tough on the industry. At the Federal Trade Commission,
the failure to revive the “click to cancel” rule
<https://prospect.org/justice/2025-07-10-anti-bureaucracy-measure-runs-into-bureaucracy-ftc-click-to-cancel/>
is
a big bonus for tech firms that offer subscriptions that they make
difficult to end. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic FTC commissioner
who was illegally fired by Trump (a lawsuit challenging the firing was
initially successful but is under appeal), referred to the merger between
advertising giants Omnicom and Interpublic. The FTC approved it with only
one condition
<https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/06/ftc-prevents-anticompetitive-coordination-global-advertising-merger>:
The merged company cannot facilitate advertiser boycotts based on political
viewpoints, a stipulation clearly intended to protect Elon Musk’s X from
public pressure.

“There’s been a lot of rhetoric about working for the people and populism,
and a lot of action in the other direction,” Slaughter said. She believes
that the firing of her and fellow Democratic commissioner Alvaro Bedoya
(who has since resigned) represented a tipping point for the agency. Before
that, the FTC maintained former chair Lina Khan’s merger guidelines and
challenged mergers. Since then, it has fallen along pro-monopoly lines.

“I don’t think our firing is a small part of that,” Slaughter said. “It was
saying to [Republican FTC commissioners] Andrew [Ferguson] and Melissa
[Holyoak] and Mark [Meador], ‘Do everything I say for my corporate
overlords or you get fired.’ It can’t be divorced from that tableau with
the tech oligarchs at the inauguration.”

With a relatively paltry investment
<https://www.wsj.com/tech/trump-tech-executives-scorecard-7ab51d22>, Big
Tech CEOs are reaping a massive return. The cries from Trump and the
Republicans of “taking on Big Tech” are absurd. And it should concern
everyone that those antitrust lawsuits against the tech giants will end
with wrist slaps and nothing of consequence. Trump’s too invested in being
Silicon Valley’s man in Washington.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.citizenstrade.org/pipermail/ctcfield-citizenstrade.org/attachments/20250725/17821464/attachment.htm>