A look at Facebook and Google's funding of nonprofits shaping the privacy debate; together they gave $960K+ to Center for Democracy and Technology alone in 2018
Bloomberg Law :
Context & Ripple Effects
Bloomberg Law's disclosure puts hard numbers on a quieter channel of tech influence than lobbying filings: Facebook and Google together gave more than $960,000 in 2018 to the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that helps define where the privacy debate lands. That sits alongside the disclosed lobbying ledger — Google's roughly $150M decade of US lobbying, with Facebook next at about $81M — as two prongs of the same influence budget.
It also rhymes with the New Statesman finding that six EU academic institutes received tens of millions from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft over five years: platform money reaching the researchers and advocacy groups who supply the evidence and arguments regulators rely on.
First-order effects
- CDT's independence on privacy questions is now publicly quantified — journalists and lawmakers can weigh its positions against the $960K+ annual inflow from the very companies its work touches.
Second-order effects
- Disclosure pressure spreads: with lobbying totals already tracked annually (the Big Five's $61.1M federal spend in 2020, per CNBC) and EU academic funding under investigative scrutiny, nonprofit grant ledgers become the next line item reporters and watchdogs audit.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the policy-advocacy ecosystem around big tech splits into funded-insider groups like CDT and explicitly adversarial outsiders — and funders' names on every major privacy position become standard context rather than an exposé.
The trend: Big tech is diversifying its influence spend beyond lobbying into the research and advocacy institutions that frame regulation, forcing disclosure of grants alongside lobbying filings.