Our resistance to Google must unite the wide swath of people who stand to suffer from Google's decisions - immigrants, racial minorities, poor and over-policed communities, women, sexual and gender minorities, and anyone fighting for a just livable future. Our list of demands reflect the immediate and urgent needs of this expansive coalition.
Israel has been keeping the people of Palestine in a perpetual state of apartheid, repression, and gradual displacement for over seven decades. Today, Gaza has been flattened by the Israeli military, over 55,000 people have been killed, and tens of thousands of Gazans are being forced to be choose between risking the starvation of their children and being gunned down outside of aid distribution centers. Meanwhile, Israel has been accelerating the pace of displacement of Palestinians throughout the West Bank.
Throughout this history, Israel has developed a reputation for finding new ways to weaponize advanced technology to repress and control Palestinians. Even before October 2023, Gaza and the West Bank were some of the most surveilled places in the world, and military outposts were outfitted with advanced automated weapons systems. That reputation has only been reinforced as Israel developed multiple AI systems for tracking Palestinians, generating targets, and deciding when and where to bomb.
Google has been complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people even before 2023. Since 2021, Google has been building computing infrastructure for all branches of the Israeli government via Project Nimbus. We knew from the beginning that Google was required to provide services for all branches of the Israeli government, including the military, intelligence agencies, and law-enforcement agencies. We knew as early as 2022 that this contract included the provision of AI, machine vision, object tracking, and sentiment analysis tools from Google's suite of Cloud services - the principal instruments of mass surveillance which Israel has pioneered for the purposes of repressing Palestinians for decades.
As the Genocide unfolded, we learned that in March 2024, months into the Genocide, Google formally opened Project Nimbus to the Israeli Military. We've learned that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian personally signed off on the contract despite risks being raised by ethics and legal teams about the oversight (or lack thereof) over how their products were used and the risk that they were used in human rights abuses. We've heard Israeli military commanders praise the Cloud offerings of multiple companies, including Google, as "weapon[s] in every sense of the word". We've learned that Israel has weaponized Google's consumer projects, using Google Photos to build hit lists of alleged Palestinian militants.
Even before Donald Trump was president, the United States military was used to enforce it's world-wide economic domination and colonial holdings with the world's most powerful military. The United States violently disrupts and undermines the autonomy and self-government of indigenous peoples globally, installing puppet governments to extract their resources and use their people for labor. These practices do not only happen outside of the U.S. - they do, and have always, happened within as well. In recent years, several U.S. States have mobilized their own National Guards in recent years to boost manpower for (illegal) state-level deportation initiatives.
Now, Donald Trump has his cronies at the head of the U.S. military (Pete Hegseth); U.S. intelligence agencies, including the NSA and the CIA; and law enforcement agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and CBP (Kristi Noem), the FBI (Kash Patel), the DEA, and the ATF. Trump is already weaponizing these agencies however he can to repress any and all political enemies, without respect for democratic or constitutional restrictions.
At the time of this writing (June 2025), Donald Trump has deployed the California National Guard, as well as active duty Marines, to Los Angeles to quell anti-ICE riots. At the time of this writing, Donald Trump has announced plans to deploy tactical ICE units to carry out large-scale raids in several other cities, and in the face of likely protests there, will likely deploy the National Guard in those locales as well.
At the time of this writing, the Trump administration has joined Israel's military effort to destroy the Iranian regime and end the independence from the United States in the Middle East.
Multiple tech companies, including Google, have direct contracts with many of these Agencies. Google (along with Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle) is a party to the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, which makes all Google Cloud services available to the U.S. Department of Defense, including the National Guard. Google has also renewed the originally cancelled MAVEN contract with the Pentagon, providing AI image processing for military drones.
Google also supports these agencies indirectly by partnering with their other contractors. This includes Anduril, which is using Google Cloud as a key part of the AI image processing systems on surveillance towers at the U.S.-Mexico border; and is providing access to Google's generative AI, Gemini, to Palantir, a company with a long track record of providing tech for ICE, and which Trump has tapped to create a unified database on every American citizen (from snopes, no paywall).
When Roe-vs-Wade was overturned in 2022, and State-level bans on reproductive health care suddenly became a surreal reality for people around the country, Google was actually sympathetic to their plight. Within the company, they offered no-questions-asked relocation for (full-time) employees in affected areas; and in the domain of their consumer products, Google promised to pro-actively delete user location data in the vicinity of abortion clinics (although the degree to which this was or is actually done is disputed).
This kind of protection is urgently needed by so many more of Google's users today - undocumented immigrants, trans and queer people living in states that criminalize their existence, historically over-policed communities. However, instead of expanding such protections, today Google is actively working to accelerate the process of satisfying police requests for user data (although trying to do this with AI is not going as well as anticipated).
As our previous demand's explanation stated, Google collects an enormous amount of data on all of it's users; this data is ripe for weaponization by the Trump Administration; and Google is actively working to accelerate the processes that release this data to Trump's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Google has a lot of trust to earn back before we can in good conscience tell Google's users that their data is safe in Google's possession - especially vulnerable targets of the Trump administration. This is why we are demanding that Google allow a third-party auditor to inspect how data is collected, stored, and potentially provided to Fascist intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Such an audit should include the source code, automated systems, and other computing infrastructure supporting the following products:
Since Donald Trump was elected, he has scrutinized all federal agencies and federal contractors for "DEI" practices. He has fired hundreds of federal workers in DEI positions, and has threatened contract terminations for contractors if they maintain such programs among their own workforce.
As a federal contractor, Google has signaled intent to comply with this order in multiple concerning ways since then. Shortly after Trump's inauguration, Google quietly removed the "Gender Identity" category from it's hate-speech protection policies on YouTube. Also, in attempting to help the General Services Administration comply with Trump's purge of Trans government employees, Google rushed the implementation of a feature that allowed Google Workspace administrators to disable user pronouns. However, instead of just affecting Government Services Administration users, due to faulty infrastructure, all pronoun data for all Google Workspace users was deleted. Internally, Google has eliminated DEI hiring practices, and has reduced the ability for Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to provide services or host events exclusive to their membership.
These incidents demonstrate the immense power Google has to protect vulnerable users of our platforms - or to leave them to fend for themselves. Google must not let it's platforms becomes vectors for victimization and erasure of trans and queer identities.
The climate crisis threatens the stability of the ecosystem, the world economy, and global life support systems. Donald "Drill-Baby-Drill" Trump calls it a hoax, and is actively dismantling every mechanism that the United States managed to put in place to counteract it in the last several decades (which wasn't near enough to begin with). Donald Trump has (again) unilaterally withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, has completely de-regulated the fossil fuel industry, and has opened most U.S. federal lands and seaspaces to drilling, mining, and other resource extraction. Before Trump was re-elected, many scientists believed that the previous goal of keeping temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels was already doomed. Donald Trump's second term may be the global nail in the coffin that dooms us to more than 2 degrees Celsius, and likely worse due to climate tipping points likely to be triggered at that level of warming.
In another life, Google was a standout (if still far from perfect) among the tech industry for their innovations regarding business sustainability and ESG practices. However, in 2019 and 2020, Google announced a number of partnerships with U.S. oil companies to provide AI technology to oil companies to help accelerate the identification and exploitation of new oil reserves (e.g. Schlumberger). Additionally, Google started a new partnership with Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company. This partnership remains in place today.
Climate scientists have made it clear - if we are to prevent warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius, we cannot build any new fossil fuel infrastructure. Google apparently didn't care then, and with Donald Trump's blessing, cares even less now. We must show Google that the people, Google's users, depend on the planet for our life, and we will use the power we have to .
The advent of Generative AI has started an arms race, among world superpowers and among tech companies. Everyone is competing to build their own models ever bigger, and integrate them into ever more aspects of our life and into the tech products these companies offer. More model training, larger models, and more queries to these models, requires more computers. This has intensified the already problematic expansion of new Data Centers by all major tech companies in recent years. One predicted impact includes universally skyrocketing utility rates for everyone to offset the costs of Data Center electricity usage.
Also, with choice data center locations already snatched up, tech companies are expanding into more unconventional areas. Despite requiring massive quantities of water for data center cooling, many of these growing data center hubs are water-scarce areas, sometimes even in arid hot deserts. To make matters worse, in order to avoid pipe corrosion in water-cooled facilities, data centers often have to tap into municipal drinking water supplies. These thirsty data centers have reduced the availability of water for local communities already suffering from water scarcity. This has led to local efforts to resist the construction of these data centers.
While local efforts have had some success resisting harmful Data Center expansion, the Trump Administration has announced support for the expansion of Data Centers in the United States through a venture called Project Stargate. Donald Trump has indicated he may potentially use a combination of executive orders and emergency declarations to facilitate this expansion. And based on how this administration has acted so far, we can expect such actions will include repression of local resistance through state or federal police crackdowns.
In 2018, Google workers revolted when they learned that management, in secret, had begun working with the Pentagon on Project MAVEN, which provided AI products and engineering expertise to the Department of Defense. While workers were able to successfully cancel the renewal of the contract, Google management began slowly, stealthily, but steadily dismantling it's historically open culture. It began by creating a new internal data classification, called "NTK" (Need-to-Know), which indicated information that could not be shared with your co-workers unless they had a business justification for it. In 2019, when workers again learned of an odious contract, this time with CBP, Google for the first time fired several workers who were organizing against these contracts.
In the following years, Google would accelerate it's integration with the military-policing-industrial-complex, entering Cloud contracts like Project Nimbus with the Israeli government and the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability for the U.S. Department of Defense. As workers grew concerned, Google began subtly censoring worker speech on internal platforms, closing threads that were deemed "disruptive". In 2022, Google again fired a worker, this time for speaking out against Project Nimbus. As the stakes of Google's involvement in Project Nimbus escalated after October 7th, and it became abundantly clear that during it's Genocide of Gaza, Israel was pioneering the use of AI in warfare, Google workers escalated their organizing. In response, HR processes were weaponized to burden dissident workers with bogus complaints; anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies were selectively enforced to protect pro-Israel workers and suppress pro-Palestinian voices; and ultimately 50 Google workers protesting their company's involvement in the Genocide were fired.
When Donald Trump was re-elected, all federal contractors were scrutinized for "DEI" practices, and were threatened with contract terminations. As Google is a federal contractor, Google began rolling back DEI hiring initiatives, and has kneecapped Employee Resource Groups' ability to provide unique opportunities for their members.
Unless something is done, we can only expect that Google will slide further from it's previous commitments to create a fair, equitable workplace. Google workers cannot make Google a more equitable workplace, and cannot act to hold Google accountable to their users and to the people impacted by their business decisions, unless Google reinstates protections from harassment and arbitrary discrimination from leadership, and allows workers to freely communicate with each other about how our labor is used.
Googlers Against Tech Oligarchy was started shortly after the second election of Donald Trump in November 2024. Given the authoritarian reality that Trump engendered, we identified several urgent adaptations required for sustained future organizing:
After his replacement by Biden in 2020, Trump consistently telegraphed his intent, should he re-take power, to eliminate democracy, remain in power indefinitely, persecute his enemies, scapegoat and persecute unpopular minorities, and wreck the planet. All signs indicated he would waste no time picking up where he left off at the end of his first term. Furthermore, given the rapid progress that the biggest tech companies, including Google, had made in integrating with the military-industrial complex in the last decade, meant that Trump would have enormous material leverage over these companies. We knew that Trump would use this leverage to secure access to the powers of surveillance capitalism these tech Oligarchs wield, and given Trump's authoritarian tendencies, we feared he would work to establish an unprecedented scale of Techno-Totalitarianism from the top of the world's greatest military power. As soon as the election was finalized, we knew we had to begin organizing immediately if we had any chance of building a resistance capable of disrupting the wedding between tech and fascism on the aggressive timeline that Trump would attempt to bring it about.
In recent years, Google has put itself on the wrong side of every existential struggle for a livable future for humanity, and of every global struggle for equality and justice. To resist Google, concerned workers need to work with a broad coalition of constituents from each of these struggles to achieve enough leverage to bring Google to the negotiating table. We don't have time to pressure Google on a single issue at a time, and we won't have enough leverage to move Google on any of our demands unless we combine forces and stand in solidarity until we have moved Google to the right side of all of these struggles.
Trump's re-election to a Republican trifecta firmly under his direction, with the assent of tech Oligarchs and capitalists more generally, made all previous constitutional guarantees unlikely to remain in place. For it's part, Google's unceremonious firing of 50 of it's workers who were protesting our complicity in the world's first live-streamed AI-powered genocide - workers who were engaging in legally protected activity under the National Labor Relations Act - proved that Google no longer cared about it's public image, and either believed that the U.S. legal system (under either potential administration) would side with Google, or was prepared to eat the legal costs it would incur, in order to show investors and it's new military-industrial customer base that it was serious about meeting their needs. Neither constitutional protections nor labor law could be relied on to facilitate our organizing. Furthermore, the integration of military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials into the ranks of Google leadership meant that attempts to organize within company-owned infrastructure would be subject to increasing digital surveillance, censorship, and preemption. And if we were going to motivate Google to change, we could not rely on simply winning the war of information - we can only motivate Google to change if we can convert it's misbehavior into concrete business cost. And given the hostile internal environment at Google, and the fact that worker organizing at Google is still in the very early stages, we concluded that we could not do it from the inside alone - to win on Trump's aggressive timeline, we concluded that we must pool the knowledge and positionality that workers of conscience *do* have, with mass movements directly impacted by Google's business decisions, who are more directly motivated to make real change.
