Hold Corporations Accountable for Driving Up Prices

Dominant corporations are using digital tools to break the rules. We’re exposing their tricks and advancing bold policies.

Vision

Vision

Across the country, families are paying more than ever for groceries, rent, and travel, while corporate profits soar. This isn’t by accident. It’s a price crisis caused by corporations using technology to surveil and collude against their customers.

We want families to live in a world where the cost of living is determined fairly and transparently. Where small business owners do not feel pressure to steal their customers’ data to keep up with the big chains. And pricing remains stable, not changed by the whims of secretive algorithms.

This moment demands more than small tweaks. To combat the price crisis, we need updated rules to rein in dominant corporations.

Challenge

Challenge

For decades, trickle-down economics, deregulation, and a hands-off approach to antitrust have given big corporations major advantages. The result? An economy where a few players dominate nearly every sector, backed by trillion-dollar investment funds pulling the strings. Without competition, corporations have all the cover they need to raise prices without fear of being undercut.

Today, dominant corporations aren’t just raising prices—they’re tracking our every move to see how high they can go. First, Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon poured millions into lobbying and funded think tanks to weaken or block legislation that would have protected consumer privacy, such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act and proposed federal data laws. By strategically shaping the rules and funding research to appear neutral, these companies amass detailed behavioral profiles on millions of people. Then, they use that data to adjust the price you see based on what you can afford. An example of this is rent-setting software that landlords use to set prices based on your income, location, and forecasted demand. It’s a system built to surveil and extract, turning your most personal data into a price hike you never see coming.

When the rich and powerful use your personal data to predict your future behavior, manipulate the market, and make costs unpredictable and unaffordable, that is surveillance capitalism.

Families face impossible tradeoffs as a result of rising prices. Rising rent means less cash for groceries, and a more expensive doctor’s visit can mean delaying a utility payment. Small business owners are squeezed out as dominant corporations use real-time pricing tech to their advantage. Despite a radically consolidated economy, some politicians continue to rely on outdated assumptions about free markets. As prices rise and government tools fall short, public trust in their government erodes. The true cost of the price crisis is the health of our democracy.

What We Do

What We Do

Economic Security Project is growing a movement to restore fairness by reining in unfair market tactics. We are setting a bold policy agenda, organizing allies, and communicating with the public to expose how wealthy interests are inflating prices and exploiting consumers.

We’re making the price crisis visible, connecting the dots between sky-high costs and corporations wielding hidden power. We work with researchers and policy leaders to modernize antitrust laws and regulate algorithmic price fixing. And we’re building the public pressure needed to keep corporate power in check.

In California, we’re supporting a legislation package to stop algorithmic price fixing, surveillance pricing, and pandemic-era price gouging. These common-sense bills—like the Preventing Algorithmic Price Fixing Act (AB 325)—make it illegal for corporations to use software to secretly coordinate price hikes and hold tech developers accountable when their tools are used to break the law.

Whether it’s Big Tech helping to inflate the cost of housing or fast-food companies manipulating the cost of french fries, we’re here to stop the wealthiest few from extracting cash from the many. When markets are fairer, more families thrive, and the economy can work for everyone.

People

People