California's 'Nonprofit Alliance' becomes an ally of Big Telecom

The weaponization of nonprofit advocacy and service organizations has been ongoing in Sacramento (CA) (and Washington) for years, although it seems to have risen recently to new levels of duplicity and complexity. If you were hanging around Sacramento this legislative year, for example, you couldn’t help but run into The Nonprofit Alliance, a newly constituted advocacy group which claimed to be the voice of nonprofits.  You might have heard them arguing that regulation of AT&T and Comcast’s broadband service would harm nonprofits and possibly put them out of business, or that CA’s newly enacted privacy law went too far in protecting consumers. So who, or what, is The Nonprofit Alliance?  It was incorporated in Washington DC in Jan of 2019.  According to the Nonprofit Times,the organization is a newly-minted merger of two former advocacy organizations, the Data Marketing Association, a coalition of for-profit advertising and marketing companies, and American Charities for Reasonable Fundraising Regulation.