Several bills moving through the Legislature this session would require data center operators, rather than everyday ratepayers, to shoulder more of the cost of the electrical infrastructure needed to power the massive facilities. Other measures would force companies to disclose or estimate how much water their data centers consume and would require environmental review for all such projects going forward.

Tech companies have pushed back hard, arguing the proposed regulations would slow innovation and put California at a competitive disadvantage. That opposition has come with a hefty price tag. Amazon alone spent more than $1.7 million on state lobbying last year, while AI firm Anthropic spent $90,000. The Data Center Coalition — whose membership includes Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — spent roughly $60,000 fighting nearly every bill aimed at regulating the industry.

The strategy has paid off before. Last year, four bills that would have imposed limits or additional oversight on data centers were either killed outright or significantly weakened before reaching the governor’s desk.

But the political landscape has shifted since then. A Gallup poll conducted in March found that seven in 10 Americans oppose having data centers built in their communities, and survey data from the Public Policy Institute of California suggests a similar level of unease among state residents.

Assemblymember Diane Papan, a San Mateo Democrat who authored two of the bills under consideration, said the growing public frustration is impossible for lawmakers to ignore.

“When you’re looking down the barrel of public outcry that says we don’t want (data centers) at all, and you’ve got localities that are saying they’re going to ban them, then you know the atmosphere has changed,” Papan said.

Whether that shift in sentiment will be enough to overcome the tech industry’s deep pockets remains an open question as the legislative session moves toward its conclusion.

OTHER STORIES WORTH KNOWING

A new statewide report suggests that a decade-old criminal justice reform may have contributed to California’s homelessness crisis. Researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California found that Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that reclassified certain low-level drug and theft felonies as misdemeanors, likely drove a roughly 10% increase in street homelessness between 2015 and 2019 — adding an estimated 7,000 people to the ranks of Californians sleeping outside, in cars or in parks.

The measure was originally intended to ease prison overcrowding, and the findings arrive as many voters have grown skeptical of past efforts to reduce incarceration — sentiment reflected in the passage of the tougher-on-crime Proposition 36 in 2024. Still, the report has drawn criticism over what some see as an uncomfortable implication: that jails effectively served as a form of housing for some vulnerable residents. Margot Kushel, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, pushed back on that framing, noting that “criminal legal systems were not designed to be places for people to live.”

Meanwhile, Democratic legislators are fast-tracking a bill that would ban the use of electric shock gloves by federal immigration agents, along with state and local law enforcement. The move comes after the federal government announced plans to spend up to $20 million on thousands of the taser-like devices for use by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Civil rights advocates back the ban, pointing to cases such as a Kentucky man who died last year after reportedly being shocked roughly 40 times while in custody. Law enforcement groups oppose the measure, arguing it would limit officers’ ability to safely de-escalate confrontations. Legal experts have also raised doubts about the bill’s enforceability, since states generally cannot dictate how federal agents perform their duties — a limitation UC Davis law professor Vikram Amar says makes the legislation “more performative than real.”

In other Capitol news, lawmakers reached a compromise on legislation addressing sexual abuse claims against California schools. The deal reduces some of the financial exposure school districts face and raises the evidentiary threshold for older claims, though it stops short of capping payouts as some public agencies had hoped.

Original source: CalMatters

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That gap is now drawing renewed attention as lawmakers in Sacramento weigh additional restrictions, including a potential ban on “addictive” social media feeds for teens under 16 and new limits on AI chatbots following a string of troubling incidents involving young users.

Concerns over rising rates of teen anxiety, depression and suicide — trends researchers have repeatedly linked to heavy social media use — pushed California to act well before Congress found any consensus on the issue.

“California, everything there is changing and changing fairly dramatically within the last just four years,” said Ed Howard, senior policy advocate with the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego.

The state’s push began in earnest with the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which required parental consent before companies could collect data from children under 13 — mirroring the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA — but went further by requiring teens ages 13 to 16 to consent themselves before their data could be gathered.

In 2022, lawmakers passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which forces companies to estimate the ages of their users and default to the strongest privacy settings for anyone believed to be a minor. The law also cracks down on “dark patterns” — design tricks that nudge users, particularly children, toward choices that may not be in their best interest.

“If there’s a product that’s likely to be accessed by children, it has to be, by design and by default, safe for them,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who helped write the measure.

Wicks also authored a follow-up law requiring devices to include an age “signal” that businesses can use to estimate a user’s age. It’s considered one of the toughest requirements of its kind in the country, though a series of legal challenges from the tech industry have blunted some of its provisions.

Meanwhile, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act of 2024 bars platforms from showing minors algorithm-driven “addictive” feeds without parental permission and restricts when companies can send notifications to teenagers. That law, set to take effect in 2027, has already withstood court challenges.

More recently, California has turned its attention to artificial intelligence. Lawmakers passed legislation requiring mental health safeguards for AI chatbots after a series of disturbing cases involving teenagers, including the death of Adam Raine, a California teen who died by suicide after months of conversations with ChatGPT about his despair.

Raine’s mother, Maria, testified before the state Senate’s Privacy, Digital Technologies and Consumer Protection Committee, describing how the chatbot morphed from “a homework helper” into “a confidant, then a suicide coach.”

Under the new law, AI chatbots must disclose that they are not human, and companies are required to take reasonable steps to shield children from graphic content. Additional bills under consideration would require AI companies to conduct annual assessments of potential mental health risks to young users and give parents more control over how their kids interact with chatbots.

By contrast, Congress has struggled for years to pass comprehensive federal protections. The Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, currently under consideration, would extend COPPA protections to everyone under 18 and ban targeted advertising aimed at children and teens — but the bill faces criticism from both child-safety advocates, who say it doesn’t go far enough, and civil liberties groups concerned about free speech. Its prospects in a divided Congress remain uncertain.

Still, for all its progress, California’s protections pale in comparison to some international frameworks. Brazil, for instance, passed its ECA Digital law this year despite heavy lobbying from tech companies. The law bans behavioral advertising aimed at children, mandates default privacy protections and parental supervision tools, and prohibits addictive design features such as autoplay and infinite scroll for young users.

Wicks said she has looked to international examples, including the United Kingdom’s Age-Appropriate Design Code, which inspired California’s own version.

“We steal good ideas when we see them from other places,” she said.

Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat, a policy advisor at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights who studies global privacy law, said California and Brazil’s regulations already share significant common ground — but constitutional differences limit how far the U.S. can go.

“I think there’s quite a bit of overlap, but where they diverge is mostly because of specific constitutional features of the U.S. legal system,” she said, noting that the First Amendment has repeatedly been used by tech companies to challenge laws restricting algorithmic content.

Texas Tech University researcher Marina Petric argues that this reliance on U.S.-style free speech protections amounts to what she calls “First Amendment fundamentalism,” one that other countries aren’t bound to follow. “The U.S. narrative has been embedded into the architecture of digital platforms as though it were a universal standard,” she said.

Even so, Olaizola Rosenblat believes certain elements of Brazil’s law — such as mandatory parental supervision tools — could be adapted for use in the U.S. without running afoul of constitutional protections.

Beyond legal hurdles, both she and Howard point to a more practical obstacle: the sheer financial power of the tech industry.

“The thing that is, by a wide margin, the biggest reason, is the power of money in our system and the fact that our system is uniquely vulnerable to the power of that money,” Howard said.

According to a CalMatters analysis, tech companies poured more than $39 million into political spending and lobbying in California in 2025 alone, much of it aimed at fighting regulation of AI and cryptocurrency. Meta alone contributed $150,000 to the California Democratic Party and funneled $20 million into a new political action committee, saying the money was meant to “help elect state political candidates in California — no matter their party affiliation — that support and defend the American tech industry.”

“I think the main problem is the tech lobby, which is very successful in the U.S. and maybe not as successful in other jurisdictions like Brazil,” Olaizola Rosenblat said. “Because they know that the most threatening thing to them would be a federal law in the U.S.”

For Howard, the calculus is simple: tech firms have little incentive to embrace stronger privacy protections voluntarily.

“When it comes to privacy, every business has a financial stake in there being very little privacy,” he said.

Original source: CalMatters

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The deal, announced last August, committed California and Google to each put tens of millions of dollars into a fund to be distributed to local news outlets over five years. In exchange, lawmakers scrapped two ambitious proposals that sought to force the search engine behemoth and its tech counterparts to pay outlets for using their published content.

But Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday proposed to slash the state’s initial commitment to the journalism fund by two-thirds. 

Department of Finance spokesperson H.D. Palmer wrote in an email that the administration is seeking to reduce the state’s first-year payment of $30 million to $10 million solely because of “fewer resources than projected in the January budget.” The cut is part of Newsom’s May budget proposal, in which he’s seeking to close an estimated $12 billion shortfall for the 2025-2026 fiscal year that begins in July. 

The proposal to reduce the state’s share of the funding outraged local news advocates and proponents of requiring tech platforms to pay journalism outlets for their content — who already called last year’s deal insufficient. It raises questions about Google’s commitment to paying its share of the matching funds, and the overall status of the agreement which was announced in August but appears to have made little progress toward becoming reality. 

There were no signed term sheets in Google’s handshake deal with the state and with lawmakers last year — only public promises. 

“It’s extremely disappointing,” said Steven Waldman, president of the journalism advocacy group Rebuild Local News. “It was already too small and they’ve walked in the wrong direction from it at a time when the collapse of community news in California continues … Pink slime and rumor and misinformation is flooding into the vacuum so time is of the essence to try to turn this around. Instead, the effort is shrinking.”

A draft of the deal released last year suggested UC Berkeley would administer the funding program; the university has since declined to do so and the state has not announced a new administrator. As a result, Google also does not appear to have made its first-year payment of $15 million toward the fund, Waldman said.

The deal did not include strict timelines, but proponents said they aimed to “front-load” much of the money in the first year, which they believed could garner more private contributions along the way.

Deal struck after millions in lobbying from Google

Neither Newsom’s office nor Google responded to inquiries. The Computer and Communications Industry Association, a lobbying group that last year was largely bankrolled by Google to oppose the news bills, declined to comment. Google’s payments to influence state lawmakers surged to almost $11 million from July through September last year when the bills were under consideration – 90 times more than it has ever spent on lobbying in California over the same period of time.

A spokesperson for Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who negotiated the deal last year in exchange for abandoning her bill that would have required platforms such as Google and Meta to either pay a fee or negotiate with news outlets for using their news content, said there would be “more information to share on this in the coming days.”

Wicks, in a statement, did not address the proposal to cut state funding. Instead the Oakland Democrat thanked Newsom for “for making an essential public investment that strengthens journalism” and described the funding as a “down payment, combined with those of private and philanthropic partners.”

After the first-year payments, Google and the state both were to put $10 million a year into the fund for four more years. 

The company also agreed to continue paying $10 million a year in existing grants to newsrooms — money it had threatened to withhold if the legislation passed. And it planned to put $17.5 million into an unspecified artificial intelligence program that had given some journalists and their union representatives anxiety over job losses. 

Now, Waldman is worried the state’s reduction in funding could prompt the company to do the same. As part of the deal, Google specified it would only pay into the journalism fund as a match to state dollars, said former Sen. Steve Glazer, the author of the other bill that was scrapped.

“They did not want a precedent to be set in California that could be easily replicated in other states, so they insisted upon a state match,” he said. “The fact that the governor is proposing to renege on (part of the deal) is a cherry on top for Google and it allows them to reduce their contribution if they desire.”

Glazer’s bill would have imposed a fee on major tech platforms to provide news outlets a tax credit to employ local journalists. The measure, legislative staff estimated, would have raised $500 million a year. Wick’s bill requiring the platforms to negotiate payments to news outlets was modeled on similar programs in Canada and Australia, but the political headwinds were tough in the tech companies’ home state. 

Lawmakers pursued both proposals to try to stem the decline of the news industry in California.  

Following a nationwide trend, media companies have hemorrhaged jobs over the past two decades as advertisers fled print media for the internet and technological advancements reshaped how readers consume news. The state has lost one-third of its newspapers since 2005 in a trend experts say worsens civic engagement, polarization and misinformation.

To try to keep their readers, publications increasingly rely on social media and online search. Google controls the lion’s share of search in a way the U.S. Justice Department and one federal judge have said violates antitrust law. 

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