Presenting the Big Tech Lobby Playbook

Across continents and political systems, Big Tech has deployed a clear playbook when it comes to lobbying to protect its business interests. From Brazil to India, the EU to Kenya, the tech giants use the same strategies and tactics to shape, delay or kill regulation that threatens their vast monopoly power and equally vast profits. Whether the battleground is AI or the rights of platform workers, these companies work from the same manual. And why wouldn’t they? As the cases in this series have shown, it works.

The case studies reveal a highly toxic form of political influence, where Big Tech manipulates the legislative and regulatory process in ways that threaten the fabric of democracy. The strategies tech giants use go well beyond classic corporate lobbying. Like most powerful business sectors, Big Tech has regular and direct access to senior politicians and policymakers. But their access has an edge no other business sector has ever had, not even the most powerful of traditional media empires: control of global communication infrastructure. By owning the way people access and share information, Big Tech is in a position to threaten governments and shape the environment in which public debate happens.

We refer to a lobby playbook because what Big Tech is doing echoes the tactics deployed by the tobacco industry to block public health laws, commonly referred to as the tobacco industry playbook. Later analysis showed the tobacco companies were actually emulating how oil companies deliberately frustrated action on climate change. But Big Tech has taken corporate lobbying to a whole new level. These companies have the influence that Big Tobacco and Big Oil could only dream of.

They are also richer than God.

The six strategies outlined below are not all unique to Big Tech, but they are being used in ways that are distinctive to the tech giants. By exposing and understanding Big Tech’s playbook, we can begin to build the counter-power needed to reclaim democratic control over the digital future.

Strategy #1:
Control the narrative

Big Tech companies know the value of a good story. They have, across all six jurisdictions covered in this series, been able to capture the narrative almost from the outset of any government’s efforts to regulate them. And their narratives work. The core story usually focuses on economic prosperity and future well-being. In service of this narrative, they have made “innovation” a nearly magical word, one they invoke relentlessly. The concept builds on tech “solutionism”, the belief, fostered by the industry and woven into their story, that technological innovation can solve the world’s problems.

As a result of Big Tech lobbying, “innovation” is something that policymakers view as an unquestionably “good thing”. The word has been coded with a wider meaning that serves Big Tech interests so effectively that when it is invoked, all that most policymakers seem to hear is “economic prosperity”. In Big Tech’s lexicon, all “innovation” is positive, even if it means overturning decades of hard-won worker protections, or enabling social media to cause harm to children, or sucking the life out of small businesses. All of these are outcomes of tech “innovation” and are evident in the countries where the innovation argument is deployed.

“Technology evolves fast. Innovation is evolution. Get on board or get left behind,” says Big Tech. “If you ‘over-regulate’ us”, they claim, “you risk your economic future; leave us alone, and you will thrive”.

It’s a simple, powerful story. Evolve or die becomes innovate or die. And they (they claim) are the innovators par excellence. Because there are elements of truth woven into the deception, the story works. The potential benefits of technological innovation become synonymous with the idea that we should not regulate vast corporate empires.

Nowhere has the “innovation” axiom been more powerfully deployed than in Big Tech’s efforts to stop legislation around the development of AI. Here, the companies have injected a potent sense of urgency into the narrative. From Australia to the EU, Big Tech has told the story of a global race to “win” on AI. It is far from clear what this actually means, but Big Tech has nonetheless led governments to believe that the future of their economies is at stake. The “race” metaphor imparts a subliminal message: don’t stop (us), don’t delay (to think about where this is going and how to manage the risks). As the cases in this series show, the “race to win” metaphor works.

While the dominant narrative is that Big Tech is essential to economic prosperity, the companies have also shown a shrewd ability to co-opt the language of activism and human rights to defend their interests. Across multiple countries, Big Tech has set itself up as a champion of freedom of speech, a supporter of small businesses, and a defender of consumer rights. In case after case, they have labelled efforts to make them curtail harmful content as censorship. A business model that traps drivers in debt while skimming off a quarter of their fares is framed as helping entrepreneurs. Regulation to curb monopoly power will, we are told, harm consumer interests and small businesses.

But why do so many believe what is, if one stops to think, often manifest nonsense? One reason is that Big Tech’s narratives are relentlessly pounded out.

Strategy #2:
Create an echo chamber

Big Tech has the financial firepower to ensure its narratives are repeated and advanced, everywhere, all the time. With extensive teams of lobbyists, Big Tech can simultaneously plead its case to presidents and prime ministers, and to legislators at the intergovernmental, national, and regional levels. As seen in the EU’s AI Act, Big Tech lobbyists can also engage and shape technical and expert discussions from their inception to their implementation.

Big Tech also makes ample use of the “revolving door”, employing former government officials as lobbyists. This tactic blurs the lines between regulator and regulated. In the EU, around three-quarters(opens in new window) of Google’s and Meta’s accredited EU lobbyists are former EU or member-state public officials, for example.

Big Tech is everywhere, but it does not speak alone. As the cases in this series show, tech giants leverage (and sometimes create) trade industry bodies, as well as working with and paying consultancies and think-tanks that then amplify their arguments. They can also afford, as they did in the EU, to run massive ad campaigns, using traditional media tools. But this influence architecture is just the beginning.

The tech giants also engage in the process known as astroturfing – funding groups that claim to defend the interests of small businesses and consumers, to make it appear there is a grassroots constituency that “independently” supports Big Tech positions.

This network of amplifiers enables Big Tech to create an echo chamber and dominate public and policy debates while obscuring at least some of its influence. And Big Tech’s rent-a-voice approach is augmented by another playbook tactic that is unique to them.

Strategy #3:
Weaponise your own platforms

Nowhere is Big Tech’s structural power clearer than when it weaponises its control over dominant communication platforms. Deployed to significant effect in Australia and Brazil, this is when companies use the very services they control, such as search engines, social networks, or messaging apps, to influence political and public debate.

In Australia, Meta(opens in new window) shut down news content in 2021 to force the government to change policy. Australians found they could not access news, and many non-news pages, including state health departments and domestic violence shelters. This manufactured chaos forced the government to weaken the News Media Bargaining Code within a week.

In Brazil, Google flooded its own channels with messages opposing Brazil’s Fake News Bill and inserted alerts into YouTube creators’ dashboards, pushing them to take a public stand against the draft law. The misleading messages led to the cancellation of a vote on the law.

The ability to use their near-ubiquitous platforms and channels gives Big Tech a coercive power that no other private actor in society, including other big businesses, can match.

Strategy #4:
Never stop lobbying

While Big Tech has huge power to get what it wants, sometimes it fails. The workers, consumers, parents worried about their children, small businesses struggling to survive, or human rights groups fighting back, sometimes, against the overwhelming odds, succeed.

Over the past few years, however, these activists have frequently seen their victories eroded or reversed because of a Big Tech tactic used in multiple countries. If the companies don’t like the outcome, they simply keep going. The law may be passed, the safeguards agreed, but Big Tech continues to lobby regardless. This relentless lobbying, made possible by their incredibly deep pockets, is difficult, if not impossible, for public interest groups to respond to.

The companies have a range of ways to continue lobbying. They target the bodies responsible for the technical implementation of new laws, as was the case for the EU’s AI Act. A favourite tactic is dragging governments into lengthy and expensive court proceedings. By doing this, Big Tech companies can challenge implementation at every step. In the EU, Meta, Apple, and Amazon repeatedly contested decisions taken under the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. In Kenya, Uber asked the courts to strike down a new law that limited how much it could extract from drivers.

Sometimes, the efforts to undo legislation are even more blatant. The tech giants simply continue to push lawmakers and regulators after the vote to reverse what was democratically agreed upon (a tactic aided by strategy five of the playbook). If and when they are finally forced to comply with laws, they do so in ways that undermine the law in what has been called “malicious compliance(opens in new window) ”. This, like the other strands of this strategy, burns the time and resources of public regulators and ultimately the money of taxpayers.

Strategy #5:
Play the Trump card

Most Big Tech companies are US-based, and they have long leveraged the US government’s global economic dominance to push their agenda. Under the current Trump administration, US exceptionalism – never far from the surface – has become a dogma: The US is different. And so are its tech companies. The rest of the world must act accordingly, under threat of economic penalties (or worse).

Trade has become a powerful tool for translating Big Tech’s preferences into US foreign policy. Through US trade negotiations, Big Tech exports its deregulation demands globally as US officials threaten tariffs to force countries to change their policies. In 2025, Trump’s reciprocal tariffs put punitive levies on countries whose digital laws “harm US technology firms”. When Meta labelled an EU Digital Markets Act’s fine as a “multibillion-dollar tariff”, the US was swift to echo Meta and increase trade pressure.

Big Tech is not hiding how it uses US economic power to pressure other countries to drop digital regulations. Phrases like “foreign censorship” and “discrimination against US companies” play directly into the Make America Great Again (MAGA) populist ideology. The tech giants have made their choice and gone all-in with the administration, contributing(opens in new window) millions to Trump’s campaign and the White House ballroom. Their loyalty reaped quick rewards. Canada(opens in new window) withdrew its Digital Services Tax proposal. India(opens in new window) removed its equalisation levy on digital advertising by non-resident enterprises and the e-commerce law.

Strategy #6:
Repeat globally

A striking finding across all case studies is the consistency of Big Tech’s lobbying strategies. This copy-paste approach reveals how the tech giants deploy their structural power globally.

Big Tech companies leverage their financial resources, legal and lobbying teams, data access, network of allies, and platform control to implement strategies and tactics in one jurisdiction, refine them, and rapidly replicate them elsewhere.

The companies back each other up, deploying their shared tactics in the service of common goals. In Kenya, Bolt and Uber, for example, put aside their intense rivalry to lobby together against a new cap on their commissions. In Brazil, Telegram(opens in new window) pushed mass notifications to millions of users in an effort to stop the Fake News Bill, just weeks after Meta and Google had deployed a similar tactic in the country.

The result is a highly asymmetric political battlefield. While civil society, journalists, academics, and regulators operate locally and often with limited resources, Big Tech coordinates globally, learns fast, and intervenes everywhere at once. It is how Big Tech systematically spreads, entrenches, and expands its power worldwide.

Strategy for the future: a looming alliance with far-right forces

The above strategies are tried and tested, but they are not static, and we are starting to see a shift in how these companies operate. The growing alignment with far-right forces in the US and Brazil is a particularly worrying sign of things to come. This alliance, combined with Big Tech’s control of information infrastructure, creates a unique threat to democracy writ large. Meta has already adapted(opens in new window) content policies to appease the Trump administration, and Elon Musk has used X to tip the scales(opens in new window) towards the German far-right. We do not yet see the full dimensions of their impact, but what is observable is alarming.

More than any other industry, Big Tech has the power to influence how people and policymakers think and what choices they believe exist. What happens if Big Tech tightens this grip further? Lobbying might become redundant if a small group of actors controls the information flows and algorithms that shape elections, not just laws.