Clay Montgomery owns a blacksmith shop in Texas. He works with his hands, shaping metal into useful objects the old-fashioned way. Technology, as he puts it, “is not exactly my forte.”
So Montgomery was understandably confused when he discovered his business was listed as a member of the “Connected Commerce Council” – a lobbying group advocating for Big Tech’s interests in Washington, D.C.
Montgomery had never heard of the organization. He certainly hadn’t signed up to support Amazon and Google’s political agenda. Yet there his blacksmith shop was, listed alongside thousands of other small businesses supposedly demanding that Congress go easy on technology regulation.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Montgomery told investigators who contacted him. His confusion was shared by business owners across the country – a hair salon in Minnesota, a barbershop in Texas, an auto towing company in South Carolina – all supposedly members of an organization they’d never joined, advocating for policies they didn’t understand.
This isn’t a glitch in the system. This is the system working exactly as designed.