Biden’s top advisor seen as making tech regulation more likely

SAN FRANCISCO: President-elect Joe Biden’s chief technology adviser helped craft California’s landmark online privacy law and recently condemned a controversial federal statute that protects Internet companies from liability, indicators of how the Biden administration it can fail on two key technology policy issues.

Bruce Reed, a former Biden chief of staff who is expected to take on a major role in the new administration, helped negotiate with the tech industry and lawmakers on behalf of sponsors of a ballot initiative that led to the Privacy Act of the United States. 2018 California Consumer. Privacy advocates see that law as a possible model for a national law.

Reed also co-authored a chapter in a book published last month in which he denounced the federal law known as Section 230, which makes it impossible to sue Internet companies over the content of user posts. Both Republicans and Democrats have called for the reform or abolition of 230, which critics say has allowed abuse on social media to flourish.

Reed, a veteran political operative, was Biden’s chief of staff from 2011 to 2013, when Biden was vice president of the United States. In that role he succeeded Ron Klain, who was recently appointed incoming White House chief of staff. Reed later served as president of the Broad Foundation, a major Los Angeles philanthropic organization, and later as an advisor to the Laurene Powell Jobs Emerson Collective in Palo Alto, California.

The Biden campaign identified Reed as its best tech policy person, but declined to make him available for an interview.

CALIFORNIA PRIVACY

Reed, 60, became involved in the California privacy campaign in his capacity as a strategist for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization created by Stanford University professor James Steyer to advise parents and businesses on content. healthy for kids.

Tech companies initially lined up in staunch opposition to the ballot initiative that laid the groundwork for the law, which gives consumers the right to know what information about them is being given to which companies and to have that information removed.

But Reed helped get Apple Inc out of the pack by drafting language it could live by, according to Alastair Mactaggart, the real estate developer who designed the ballot initiative.

“He understands that there must be good regulation,” Mactaggart said. “He wants to do something. He wasn’t an ideologue who would take his toys and go home if it wasn’t perfect.

With the initiative then a more credible threat, the rest of the industry was ready to come to the table when California State Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg wrote a last-minute bill that kept most of it. of the power of the initiative but offered the big tech companies the opportunity to soften it in the following years. Reed was the core of the group that worked on that bill, Hertzberg told Reuters.

“This initiative wouldn’t have happened without Bruce, there’s no question. He took it seriously when everyone else didn’t,” Hertzberg said.

Reed’s position on 230 could prove more controversial. In a book published last month, “Whose Side of History? How Technology is Reshaping Democracy and Our Lives,” Steyer and Reed co-authored a chapter calling 230 an enemy of children. Although 230 had allowed technological freedom to flourish, they wrote that it has now gone against the wishes of its backers by providing companies with a financial incentive to foster hatred and abuse.

“If they sell advertisements that run alongside harmful content, they should be considered complicit in the harm,” Steyer and Reed wrote. “If their algorithms promote harmful content, they should be held accountable for helping to repair the damage. In the long term, the only real way to moderate content is to moderate the business model.”

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Edited by Jonathan Weber and Matthew Lewis)