This commentary is by Laura Derrendinger, who co-leads the Vermont Coalition for Independence, Reconnection and Liberation.
With the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding approaching, it is time to declare Vermont’s schools independent of so-called Big Tech. The online and digital product companies — Google and Apple chief among them — are this era’s mercenaries, hired to maximize profits by putting their products directly in front of a captive audience of schoolchildren.
In March, a jury in California found Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, liable for harming children. An investigation in The New York Times exposed how both companies planned to capture students’ attention at school. Yet we’ve allowed Google’s products to become standard issue in nearly all Vermont schoolchildren’s hands. Google’s own internal documents show it deliberately places Chromebooks in schools to provide access to YouTube and build a customer base while children are young.
Our children’s school environments have become commercialized for digital product makers at the expense of their health and education.
Vermont students should be free from being targeted by marketing in the classroom. We support digital tools when independent research shows learning gains over nondigital alternatives. Most of what’s in Vermont classrooms today doesn’t meet that bar.
This legislative session, the Vermont Coalition for Independence, Reconnection and Liberation advanced two policy priorities in Montpelier to limit Big Tech’s reach into classrooms. Students and teachers should have the right to opt out of using electronic devices in school, especially since we know online crimes against children occur on school-issued devices during the school day. Second, educational technology products purchased with our tax dollars need independent, transparent review for safety and efficacy.
In pushing for that independent verification, testimony from the Agency of Education before the Vermont House Commerce Committee stated that “in the educational technology space, Common Sense Media and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) are trusted sources of information.”
ISTE and Common Sense Media have both received funding from and partnered with Meta and Google. Imagine if education leaders cited a group funded by McDonald’s and Coca-Cola as a trusted source for setting school lunch standards?
It’s the same logic as expecting Marlboro to advise on tobacco safety, or Budweiser to teach kids about underage drinking — yet the American Academy of Pediatrics directs parents to Snapchat and Instagram for guidance on keeping kids safe on social media.
When corporate interests develop relationships with trusted messengers, their recommendations will tend to serve the company’s interest in growing profits over student well-being. This is a recurring tactic across industries: catastrophic capture of the nonprofits that communities trust.
Vermont is not alone in pushing back against Big Tech in schools. In this 2026 legislative session, 16 states introduced legislation to regulate or study the effects of educational technology on students. In response, Big Tech’s lobbyists have moved into statehouses nationwide.
Product defense is a known tactic in many health-harming industries: sugar, tobacco, oil. It follows a consistent pattern: Delay and obscure to stall regulation. Our children and schools are now caught in the same playbook, at the expense of their health and education.
We submit a simple request: Question everything. Legislators and school leaders: Ask every entity that comes to you with policy recommendations to disclose how they are funded and who they partner with. If someone cites a source, check where its funding comes from.
Nonprofits and government institutions must divorce from corporate funding and influence that creates real or perceived bias in recommendations they give.
No single policy tool will solve this problem; it will take many levers at once. But it starts with refusing to let the king’s mercenaries write the rules meant to protect the people they’re paid to capture.
