American Elections: For Big Tech, Biden Brings A New Era But Doesn’t Make Scrutiny Easy

The Obama-Biden administration was a delightful era for America’s tech companies, a time when they were hailed as innovative, hailed as job creators, and largely left alone.

Now Joe Biden returns, this time as president. But times have changed. The happy days of a loving Washington are unlikely to return when Biden is sworn in in January, with mounting legislative and regulatory challenges for the industry, including stricter enforcement of antitrust laws, which will almost certainly outlast him. term of President Donald Trump.

“Techlash is in full force,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University and co-director of its High Tech Law Institute.

In the years since Barack Obama and Biden left the White House, the political fortunes of the tech industry have changed. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple have come under scrutiny from Congress, federal regulators, state attorneys general, and European authorities. Twitter has found itself in frequent clashes with lawmakers over its policies to moderate content on its platform. And companies have seen their political support erode in Congress.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle advocate tighter oversight of the industry, arguing that its enormous market power is out of control, crushing smaller competitors and putting consumer privacy at risk. They say that companies hide behind a legal shield to allow false information to flourish on their social networks or to entrench prejudices.

In the Biden steps, who can aim to take a bite out of Big Tech’s dominance and can welcome the opportunity to work with the opposite side to curb the power of a common adversary.

As a presidential contender, Biden said the disintegration of big tech companies should be considered. Dismantling the tech giants was “something we should look at very carefully,” he told The Associated Press in an interview. He said he wants to see the long-standing legal protections for social media companies to speak on their platforms quickly cut. And he criticized Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for contempt, calling it “a real problem.”

The Biden administration is also expected to go ahead with Trump’s new Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against Google, though its form is likely to change.

But if Biden decides to apply major legislation to revise the laws governing technology competition, he will have to navigate a complicated congressional and political landscape.

Democratic lawmakers in the House, after a broad investigation by a Judiciary Committee panel, asked Congress last month to curb Big Tech, possibly forcing the giants to divide their businesses while making it difficult for them to acquire others and impose new rules to safeguard competition.

Those kinds of mandatory breaks through legislative reform would be a radical step for Congress and could be a bridge too far for most Republicans.

Although it has not been resolved, Biden faces the possibility of becoming the first Democrat in modern history to take office without his party controlling Congress. Republicans would retain control of the Senate by winning one of Georgia’s two second-round elections in January. Democrats have already won the House.

Republican control of the Senate would force Biden to curb his ambitions and pursue a different legislative agenda, rooted in bipartisanship. Legislation on the tech industry could be an area of ​​possible agreement.

“Biden’s strength as a senator was precisely trying to negotiate those kinds of deals,” said Goldman of the University of Santa Clara.

But what may emerge in the end is a heavy reliance on the executive branch through more vigorous enforcement of existing antitrust laws, said Jerry Ellig, a former government official and professor at the George Washington University Center for Regulatory Studies. Republican lawmakers are likely to band together to oppose fundamental changes in the tech industry, which could also affect smaller companies, while Democrats could be pushed in different directions.

The landmark Justice Department lawsuit last month accused Google of abusing its dominance in online search and advertising to boost profits, the government’s most significant attempt to protect competition since its groundbreaking case against Microsoft more than 20 years.

Then there’s the issue of legal protection for speech on the social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, and Google – another area of ​​agreement between the two parties, albeit for different reasons.

Momentum has built in Congress to curb some of the fundamental protections that have generally protected companies from legal liability for what people post on their platforms. Republicans accuse companies of an anti-conservative bias that erases those views on social media while allowing what they describe as far-left and anti-American rhetoric to flourish.

Democrats’ concern centers on hate speech and conspiracy theories that have at times incited physical violence and on the amplification on tech platforms of Trump’s falsehoods, especially allegations of tally fraud. of votes in recent elections.

CEOs of social media companies rejected allegations of anti-conservative bias at a Senate hearing last month and vowed to aggressively defend their platforms from being used to wreak havoc in the Nov.3 election.

Critics of both political parties say that immunity under Section 230 of a 1996 telecommunications law allows social media companies to abdicate their responsibility to moderate content impartially.

Biden has said that Section 230 “should be repealed immediately.”

Given the landscape in Congress and the factions of opinion on the material seen by almost everyone on the planet, swift action can be difficult.

If consensus legislation emerges, George Washington’s Ellig suggests, “They’ll make it vague enough that everyone can claim victory.”

– Associated Press