News organizations have a natural ally in state privacy law debates — the consumer advocates who stand up for privacy and against deception

Don Marti is a strategist in web ecosystem and open source business issues. He is an invited expert for the Privacy Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium and has written or edited for several internet-related publications. 

Last time, in “Big Tech’s economic takeover can be beat,” I suggested that today’s slide into a dystopia of surveillance and deception is just another dystopia narrative, and the internet can beat those. And the big reason that I’m still an internet optimist is that, despite everything, we still have all the pieces to put together a solid coalition for moving back toward a higher-trust economy.

• Quality brands have an interest in building reputation, and people want a variety of ways to find high-quality sellers, including honest advertising.
• News sites depend on trustworthy information to stay viable.
• Most people would prefer to participate in an economy where the rules of the “games” we play are designed to put fraud and other deception at a disadvantage.

Big Tech, when working as designed, tends to drive up the value of companies’ internal datasets and network effects, at the cost of driving the rest of us into an economy-wide trust collapse. The problem of deceptive content on big social sites is not some kind of quality control issue. Big Tech stocks have transformative innovation priced in — and when their R&D teams fail to deliver the next smartphone-scale boom, the only alternatives are to let the stock crash or fill in the earnings gap with crime. So Big Tech really only has a few natural allies: scammers, harassers, and perpetrators of political misinformation.

Jean-Hugues Roy, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, found the best-known generative AI chatbots producing news summaries were “accurate in 47% of cases, but this included four cases of outright plagiarism.” The urge to push more scams and slop into more places is strong, despite the occasional step back. Google turned off some health-related “AI Overviews” but all the BIg Tech companies keep tweaking their software and policies to increase the deception level. Meta doesn’t fight scams, just makes them “less findable.” ”AI” chatbots repeat Russian misinformation when asked about the invasion of Ukraine. And the Google Search ads trademark policy has been tweaked over the years to favor infringers, despite the resulting security risks, as attackers place search ads that copy Software as a Service sites and employee portals.

In some alternate timeline, more forward-thinking Big Tech CEOs would have chosen to clean up their deception problem, to preserve reputation and their companies’ long-term prospects even at the cost of taking a short-term revenue hit. But that’s not the Big Tech CEOs we have. For these short-term revenue optimizers, quarterly numbers are everything. Sides have been chosen, and it’s Big Tech plus a bunch of fraud and misinfo perpetrators against the news media, legitimate advertisers, news site readers, and well, basically everybody.

So, that means when I go to a hearing about some privacy or consumer protection law at the state legislature, I should see Big Tech showing up alone, with everyone else coming out for sensible policies on the internet, advertising, how companies use people’s personal information, and other issues. Right?

Sorry, no. Legit businesses, including news organizations, are still lining up to oppose their own interests.  To explain how this kind of thing happens, it’s helpful to start with the story of a missed opportunity from the early days of email spam that still has consequences today.

How spammers won email

Ask anyone who runs an email list or uses an email service provider for legitimate commercial email. Their biggest email problem is the constant struggle for “deliverability” – somehow getting their outgoing mail to not be classified as spam. Every non-spam emailer must pay a “deliverability tax” and every email recipient must put up with the hassles of having important email sometimes get blocked as spam, while spam email sometimes get through. But it didn’t have to be that way.  Today’s email spam situation is a problem that the Direct Marketing Association asked for.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, things looked different. State anti-spam laws such as Washington’s CEMA, which, as Abraham Lincoln once said about patent laws, “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius,” gave email administrators and their lawyers a private right of action to go after spammers. Under state anti-spam laws, a few email server administrators and their lawyers managed to score some big wins at first. And putting an email spammer out of action didn’t just give relief to the one plaintiff. Ending one spammer’s runs helped protect every mail server on the Internet, even those that were out of state. CEMA and similar laws also deterred wannabe spammers and, hopefully, motivated them to try win-win business ideas instead.

Things were looking up. By representing their clients, anti-spam lawyers were creating a safer, lower-cost email system even for non-clients. But Congress got involved and things changed for the worse. The federal CAN-SPAM law, backed by the Direct Marketing Association, preempted state anti-spam laws and we lost some key private right of action protections that state legislators had crafted. Congress didn’t act alone. The DMA chose to jump in with both feet to lobby on the spam side of the debate. The sad part is that the vast majority of DMA member companies were already not spamming. Email spam was a violation of business norms and of legit marketers’ contracts with their service providers even before states started considering anti-spam laws. As a result of the DMA’s policy choices, today those same companies, as legitimate email users, are still paying the costs of the ongoing deliverability wars — financial, information, and uncertainty. What happened to DMA, by the way? The organization is no more. The Association of National Advertisers acquired it in 2018.

Today, news organizations are in the process of making the same mistake. Only instead of marketers lobbying for spammers, it’s news organizations doing advocacy for Big Tech’s deceptive practices by lobbying in favor of the Big Tech cross-context user tracking that enables fraud. And as online advertising has grown to dominate the industry, the stakes are far larger.

Sock puppets for Big Tech 

Big Tech stands in opposition to news sites on the issues that matter. Where news sites work to accurately report on politics, Big Tech trains algorithms for “engagement” and pushes harmful misinformation on users. While news sites do service journalism and consumer protection features, Big Tech designs their advertising systems to match fraud perpetrators with their victims. While many news sites offer constructive opportunities for teens to participate as interns and guest writers, Big Tech designs addictive interfaces and optimizes for harassment. In the big picture, news sites and Big Tech are on opposite sides.

Because the core values of news professionals and Big Tech oligarchs are so different, you might expect news organizations to stand up against Big Tech at the state legislature. You’d be wrong. Email spammers knew they weren’t popular, so relied on DMA to do their lobbying work. And today, Big Tech lobbyists realize that they’re not really popular either, and they send more sympathetic companies and organizations to advocate for them.

For example,  Google organized opposition to a California privacy bill, but kept quiet, instead relying on small businesses and business organizations. One of them, the “Connected Commerce Council,” had previously padded its member list with small businesses that didn’t know they were on it. The same small businesses that 

• Have their web content taken without permission for “AI” training
• Find their search listings and ads buried under fake competitors
• Have their ads run on illegal or policy-violating content without accountability

…receive a flood of misleading scare messages about privacy laws and get signed up to participate in hearings on Big Tech’s side. As a result, state privacy laws are typically weakened or even made actively hostile to small businesses. Unfortunately, news organizations participate, too.

One example was the recent debate over Senate Bill 690 in California. The bill (which is still active, held over from the 2025 session to 2026) would have, according to Oakland Privacy, exempted “all commercial businesses from accountability for deceptive online surveillance” by adding a blanket “commercial business purpose” exception to the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA). While there was a legitimate argument for a change to CIPA that would have limited nuisance lawsuits over normal advertising features on web sites, the SB 690 approach — advocated for by a shadowy group called the “Alliance for Legal Fairness” that runs a petition site with no contact information — would have affected even lawsuits like the Flo case, in which Meta was found to have collected “collected private menstrual health data without users’ consent and used it for ad-tracking purposes.”

Time to build on shared interests

News sites typically can’t afford to build the surveillance advertising expertise that would be required to develop positions on privacy and consumer protection laws that would work in their own long-term interests. But other organizations can. It turns out that most schemes to “violate privacy” online are downstream of some scheme being run against an advertiser or publisher. Address the underlying scheme, which is usually about commoditizing content or driving up ad rates, and the users get protected as a side effect. And the most effective policies for protecting users are often the same policies that protect legitimate advertisers while limiting the ability of the deceptive advertisers and their Big Tech enablers to do harm.

For years, Big Tech has tried, and often succeeded, in making policy debates all about a “business” side (that includes them) against a “consumer” side that covers readers and their legal and non-profit advocates. But that’s not right. By basic accounting, every win-win deal has two sides. Every time a consumer does a transaction with a positive outcome, some legitimate business made a sale. Consumers and legitimate businesses are on the same side — along with the news sites they read and advertise on. So far the connection is clearest and most productive on the editorial side. Readers like privacy tips and solid service journalism on how to protect yourself from Big Tech. But in 2026, with powerful forces on the side of fraud and disinformation, news organizations must quickly re-evaluate their positions at state capitols. Instead of signing up to back Big Tech’s positions, it’s time to build a new Team Honesty, where news and consumer organizations can be on the same side.

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Cite this article

Marti, Don  (2026, Jan. 29). Big Tech runs counter to journalism values. So why is the news industry helping tech take over? Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/big-tech-runs-counter-to-journalism-values-so-why-is-the-news-industry-helping-tech-take-over/