Biden wins: here’s what it means for tech

This story is part of Elections 2020, CNET’s coverage of the run-up to the November vote.

Joe Biden won the presidential race, ousting Donald Trump to take over the White House. Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president, made history by choosing Senator Kamala Harris as her No. 2, who will become the first woman in the United States to hold the position of vice president.

Multiple media outlets including CNN, Fox, The New York Times and major television networks called the election Saturday after projecting that Biden would win Pennsylvania, giving him more than the 270 electoral votes needed. Vote counting took longer than in most years because states were inundated with mail-in ballots cast in record numbers by people avoiding polling stations amid the coronavirus pandemic. President Trump has said he will challenge the results.

Although technological issues, including net neutrality, rural broadband, and online privacy, were hot topics in the primary season, the coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath have dominated political discussion for the past few months.

Battle lines have still been drawn on how to control the big tech companies. As the influence and size of companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook have grown, lawmakers have wondered if more regulations and reforms to antitrust law are needed. Democrats are concerned about the rampant flow of hate speech and disinformation, including interference from foreign countries in the 2020 US presidential election. Republicans, led by Trump, allege that their speech is being censored by social media sites. The companies strongly deny the claim.

Both parties say that these companies have gotten too big.

Of course, the most immediate problem facing President-elect Biden is the COVID-19 crisis, which has led to the rapid adoption of telemedicine and virtual education. The pandemic has also highlighted the digital divide that prevents millions of Americans from accessing high-speed internet.

Although technology policy did not dominate electoral issues, Biden’s presence in the Oval Office for the next four years will have a major influence on the sector, including infrastructure policy on broadband deployment and the national security issues that involve to China. The president and his team will also play a role in managing the growth and influence of the social media giants. Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies are already feeling pressure from politicians on both sides of the political corridors.

During congressional hearings in July, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai were questioned about allegedly monopolistic practices. Twitter’s Zuckerberg, Pichai and Jack Dorsey returned to Capitol Hill in October facing tough questions from Democrats and Republicans about a key internet law that helped their businesses prosper.

So far, Biden has been relatively calm about technology. Harris, who hails from California, will likely be seen by the industry more as a friend than an enemy due to her ties to Silicon Valley. But it’s hard to imagine that Big Tech would enjoy the same kind of cozy relationship it had during the Obama administration.

Here’s a look at Biden’s position on the issues.

Antitrust

The biggest problem tech companies face under President Biden will be antitrust reforms aimed at curbing the biggest tech companies.

A scathing 449-page Congressional report detailing abuses of market power by Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook likely portends future trouble for tech companies under the Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress. The report prepared by a panel of the House Judiciary Committee outlined a roadmap for Congress to curb the dominance of the four largest tech companies in the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice under Trump’s presidency filed a landmark lawsuit last month against Google, accusing the tech giant of illegally owning monopolies on search and search advertising. The lawsuit was the culmination of a more than a year-long investigation into alleged anti-competitive practices at the company and the first antitrust case of its kind in the tech world in decades.

It’s unclear how far Biden’s Justice Department will be willing to go in terms of antitrust enforcement and reforms. While Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, lobbied to disband the big tech companies, Biden has said it is too early to talk about breaking up companies and has instead leaned toward regulation as a way to curb his power.

Still, it’s clear that the US government has subjected big tech to more intense scrutiny as attitudes toward Silicon Valley companies have changed dramatically in the past few years, when Google and Facebook were hailed. like American success stories. Now that dominance has been turned against these companies.

Liability protections: Section 230

There isn’t much that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill agree on. Reforming Section 230, a decades old law, is on that short list. The law protects Google, Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants from lawsuits over the content their users post on their platforms. 

Last month, Zuckerberg, Pichai and Dorsey appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee to discuss the law, although much of the talk focused on lawmaker complaints rather than substantive reforms. Biden has been an outspoken critic of Section 230, which is part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. 

Democrats, like Biden, say Facebook and other companies are getting off too easy when bad actors use their platforms to disseminate disinformation and hate speech, as well as interfere in elections. 

Biden told The New York Times that Section 230 “immediately should be revoked” for Facebook and other platforms. “It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy,” he said.

Meanwhile, Republicans accuse social media giants of censoring conservatives online. In the weeks leading up to the election, Trump tweeted “REPEAL SECTION 230!!!” after Facebook and Twitter slowed the spread of a New York Post story that contained unverified claims concerning Biden’s son. 

All of this comes as the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission considers writing new regulations for Section 230 that would penalize companies for censoring content. A Biden Administration is likely to put the kibosh on the FCC’s efforts to write rules to police social media companies. Instead, he’s likely to look to Congress for answers. 

Net neutrality

Unlike some of the other Democrats who ran for president in 2020, Biden hasn’t said much about net neutrality. Bernie Sanders and Warren, by contrast, expressed early on in their candidacies strong support for the principle. 

Still, it’s likely that net neutrality will come back en vogue under Biden. 

A spokesman for Biden’s campaign said the president-elect is a supporter of strong net neutrality protections. 

“As Barack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden was proud to push for net neutrality and see the [Federal Communications Commission] take direct action to keep the Internet open and free for all Americans, “the spokesman said in a statement. Biden, said, was outraged to see the Open Internet Rule repealed under the Trump administration.

But Biden’s record tells a different story. As a senator, he did not co-sponsor or support net neutrality legislation, including the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007. Other prominent Democrats, including then-sens. Obama and Hillary Clinton were co-sponsors of that legislation, as was Sanders.

Biden also has a close relationship with Comcast executives, who have lobbied against strict net neutrality regulations. Comcast Senior Vice President David Cohen organized Biden’s first fundraiser after he announced his bid for president.

“Biden’s record on net neutrality is troubling, to say the least,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of the grassroots organization Fight for the Future. “Companies like Comcast and Verizon have contributed huge amounts of money to both Democrats and Republicans over the years.”

But those links are not concrete evidence of Biden’s position. It’s worth noting that Obama also held fundraisers with Comcast before eventually calling for, in a YouTube video, stricter regulation of broadband under Title II of the Communications Act. These stricter regulations treated broadband as a public service, like the old telephone network.

The political landscape has changed on net neutrality since Biden served in the Senate. Net neutrality under Title II is strongly supported by both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meaning that going against strong protections would likely challenge a fundamental principle of the current party platform.

Rural broadband

During his campaign, Biden called rebuilding America’s middle class “the moral obligation of our time.” He sees the revitalization of rural America as a cornerstone of that effort. A large part of its rural economic development strategy is investing $ 20 billion to get broadband access to communities that do not have it. He also asked to partner with municipal utilities to bring fiber broadband connections to communities in rural America.

“High-speed broadband is essential in the 21st century economy,” says Biden’s rural policy. “At a time when so many jobs and businesses could be located anywhere, high-speed Internet access should be a great economic equalizer for rural America, not another economic disadvantage.”

The COVID-19 crisis highlights the gaps in coverage. And the Biden campaign said the $ 20 billion in broadband infrastructure funding is intended to help close those gaps.

“As we face the economic impacts of this global pandemic over the next few months, it is critical that we bridge this gap and build a digital infrastructure that is available to all,” the campaign said in a statement regarding this policy.

The digital divide is an issue Republicans also acknowledge. The White House has worked with the FCC on the Rural Digital Opportunity program, which reallocates $ 20.4 billion in funding to subsidize broadband infrastructure in underserved areas. Trump has also included high-speed internet access as part of a $ 2 trillion infrastructure plan.

China and tariffs

Democrats have generally criticized Trump’s tariff war with China, which has affected imports of a wide range of tech products. Tariffs are taxes that importers pay on goods arriving from foreign countries, and Trump has used them to pressure the Chinese government on broader trade issues. Two rounds of tariffs have gone into effect, including a 15% duty on products such as phones, laptops and tablets. Another round was avoided in a “phase one“trade agreement.

In the election campaign, the Democratic candidates, including Biden and Harris, were clear on the details of how they would treat China. But Biden has made it clear that he believes the Trump negotiations have hurt Americans. He says the United States needs “new rules” and “new processes” to dictate trade relations with foreign countries.

Online privacy

Biden didn’t say much about data privacy during the campaign. However, during his years as a U.S. Senator and as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he introduced and co-sponsored several laws to make it easier for the FBI and law enforcement agencies to monitor communications, including the Communications Assistance Act for Law Enforcement, which allows law enforcement agencies to monitor communications over the Internet, including voice over IP calls and other Internet traffic.