How a few activists, concerned by the lack of regulation of US internet firms' data collection practices, led an effort that resulted in CA's new privacy bill
until it lost. https://www.nytimes.com/... Nick Confessore / @nickconfessore : My new cover story in the @nytmag is really two: About how Silicon Valley built a political machine to ward off threats to its trillion-dollar business model, and about a small group of activists who beat the machine. Thread: https://www.nytimes.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Gem, @ashk4n. “Soltani wryly pointed out that Mactaggart had offered Silicon Valley a take-it-or-leave-it privacy policy — the same kind that Silicon Valley usually offered everyone else.” http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Confessore's cover story closes a loop that began when tech and advertiser trade groups helped Congress dismantle the Obama-era internet privacy rules, leaving no federal floor for data collection (Congress rolled back those rules with the industry's backing). Post-Cambridge Analytica, public resentment gave an opening: a trio of outsiders — real estate developer Mactaggart, an ex-CIA analyst, and a finance executive — took up the cause of the California Consumer Privacy Act.
The magazine piece frames it as two stories in one: how Silicon Valley built a political machine to defend its business model, and how a small activist group — with Soltani's technical credibility behind Mactaggart's take-it-or-leave-it initiative threat — managed to beat it.
First-order effects
- California internet firms now face binding state-level constraints on data collection practices they had previously shaped only through lobbying, a direct reversal of the outcome their trade groups achieved in Washington.
- Mactaggart and Soltani demonstrated that an initiative threat could force Silicon Valley to negotiate terms it would otherwise have killed quietly.
Second-order effects
- The industry's counter-strategy shifts from blocking bills outright to shaping them — the lane occupied by lobbyists like Andrew Kingman, whose later profile shows large companies paying for influence toward lax privacy rules (Kingman's lobbying practice).
- Other states and ballot-measure organizers gain a template: if Washington won't regulate, a well-funded citizen initiative in one large market can set de facto national standards.
Third-order effects
- US data privacy governance settles into a state-led patchwork, where the strictest large-state regime becomes the compliance baseline for national platforms — the structural opposite of the pre-emptive federal framework the trade groups secured in 2017.
- If the pattern holds, platform political spending migrates from issue advocacy toward initiative-fighting and per-state defense, raising the fixed cost of the ad-supported data model itself.
The trend: Consumer data privacy in the US is being written state-by-state through initiatives and legislatures, because the industry successfully removed the federal alternative.