Voters Handed Congress a Mandate to Confront Corporate Power and Technofascism

Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, is a journalist, scholar and human rights advocate who currently directs the Center for Media & Digital Governance at Open Markets Institute and is a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She serves on the board of Tech Policy Press.

Today is a bad day to be a technofascist. Democrats’ victories in the House and Senate and across state offices represent more than just an opportunity to stave off democratic decline. They are also an instructive referendum on the power of Big Tech and AI, and the broad desire among the electorate to hold tech to account.

Concerns about unfettered power of tech firms and their aggressive AI vision have propelled a popular uprising against the infestation of data centers in communities around the country, fueled the movement against billionaires and the concentration of power in a handful of Big Tech firms, and underpinned discontent with the vast corruption and collusion between the political class and the Trump administration in particular.

When the new Congress takes office in January, the question is: will this majority confront concentrated corporate power and technofascism—or simply oversee its continued expansion?

AI governance, Big Tech accountability, monopoly break-ups, media plurality and press freedom belong on the same agenda.

The states have already shown where popular will is headed in terms of putting limits on permissible types of AI products and design and imposing product liability of AI firms.

Each of these ongoing regulatory dramas is an expression of the same underlying failure of Congress do its job on behalf of the American people. Policymakers have stood by as profit-maximizing corporations built business models on the commercial exploitation of personal and commercial data, rewarding social and psychological manipulation, and encouraging ever more surveillance.

There remains a massive legal vacuum where basic protective frameworks like fiduciary duties, liability standards, enforceable transparency and privacy safeguards simply do not exist that the next Congress can now address. It must take action to reinforce these efforts at the federal level.

Congress must also mitigate concentration of power over our information and communications system, from AI data monopolies and cloud hyperscalers to the copyright issues at the root of AI training and inference and AI content licensing, we cannot let the transition to AI entrench the same gatekeepers under new business models. Independent journalism must have the power to negotiate with tech firms through collective bargaining, statutory licensing and enforcement of copyright and antitrust law, and not merely the option to accept whatever terms platforms offer.

Understanding the power that the new majority in Congress offers a useful framework for turning this opening into action — check out the We Build Progress explainer on majority power, which is a great primer.

• Committee agendas and investigations: Use hearings and lawful subpoenas to demand answers from both corporate executives and public officials and hold them accountable. The agenda should include: Examining media consolidation and editorial retaliation by the Trump administration and formerly independent regulators that are supposed to provide oversight. Scrutinizing media mergers and investigating whether regulatory or licensing powers are being used to pressure independent reporting. Investigating exclusionary deals, lobbying and political influence by Big Tech and its AI brethren.
• Calendar and rules: Make room for sustained scrutiny of AI — both frontier and sectoral AI — information markets and communication systems to avoid another cycle of CEO appearances with no follow-through.
• Leadership: Choose leaders prepared to challenge corporate gatekeepers, including when their influence reaches inside the Democratic Party, and resist the temptation to rely once again on Big Tech largess. The people voted for accountability; Democrats should provide it.
• Floor control: Put enforceable AI safeguards including related to design and liability; stronger competition protections; updated protections against media consolidation that accounts for Big Tech players in streaming, TV and cloud; and proactive protections for workers, including information producers and the creative sectors, as well as advertising in AI on the voting agenda. Reject efforts to trade away state AI protections for industry-friendly federal inaction.

Specifically, Congress should investigate reports that Meta interfered in democratic elections in the US (for example, suspending Indivisible’s accounts during national No Kings protests) and Brazil (Meta faced allegations, including from its own employees, that it favored President Lula da Silva’s challenger in the recent elections by suspending Lula's campaign advertising account, suppressing posts, and blocking AI-generated content). Congressional investigators should do their own investigation into how Big Tech and AI companies politically interfere in or manipulate access to information and discriminate against specific types of accounts or content based on reports from independent, non-partisan experts and force executives to testify under oath.

Congressional leaders should also take full advantage of their public platform to elevate oversight, press freedom and democratic accountability rather than to confer prestige on those seeking to escape scrutiny, as has been the pattern over the past few years.

A majority is not a magic wand, but at least it’s a check on unfettered one-party rule. The Senate filibuster and presidential veto remain real constraints on legislation and will undoubtedly be deployed in Trump’s remaining lame duck term. Congress does not itself decide individual merger cases, and the Supreme Court eviscerated the role of independent agencies originally set up by Congress. But those limits are no excuse to abandon oversight, agenda-setting or the work of building stronger democratic protections and passing new laws where needed.

Winning a majority opens the door. The extent to which Democrats effectively wield public power to disperse private power, break up Big Tech’s influence over the information and communications ecosystem and defend an independent press is the test that will determine if this shift in power will curb rising autocracy and technofascism in America.