Biden pushed back on Big Tech’s power, and Trump found a few new friends

It’s Inauguration Day, and a veritable who’s who of tech are in attendance for the swearing in of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. The massive presence of tech leaders, either overtly supporting or just making nice with Trump, represents a stunning reversal from his first term.

Today, we’re looking back at what happened in between. President Joe Biden was often seen as taking an adversarial approach to the tech industry. For instance, he appointed Lina Khan, a legal scholar known for advancing novel antitrust theories aimed at Big Tech, to chair the Federal Trade Commission.

“When you have dominant firms, dominant intermediaries, or middlemen that have come to capture control over key arteries of commerce or communication, that type of power really can do a lot of harm and lead to a lot of abuses,” she said on our show in 2022, explaining her regulatory approach. “The FTC filed a lawsuit against Facebook [now Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp]. And in that lawsuit, we note that one of the harms that resulted from Facebook’s illegal behavior was a loss in user privacy. And so that’s an instance where inasmuch as data privacy is a relatively newer type of harm that we’re seeing in some of these newer markets, we’re explaining to the courts why we think they should be taking that seriously.”

The FTC also sued Amazon for alleged monopolistic practices; the agency tried and sometimes failed to block mergers like the one between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard; and the agency also boosted enforcement around privacy and child safety online.

Critics, like Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, decried the aggressive regulatory approach. “You had a very anti-business administration, death by 1,000 cuts from almost every agency,” said Shapiro. “The worst was clearly the Federal Trade Commission, which just basically sent out the message that big companies should not buy small companies. They changed from the antitrust standard, going from what’s best for consumers to what’s best to protect status quo, existing businesses. It was very anti-American and harmful to innovation.”

Scott Brennen, the director of New York University’s Center on Technology Policy, on the other hand, said the Biden administration helped enact important legislation to strengthen strategic technologies, namely semiconductors. The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act gave $52 billion in federal subsidies to the semiconductor industry to rebuild domestic manufacturing.

“Today, I’m signing the law, the CHIPS and Science Act, a once-in-a-generation investment in America itself, a law that the American people can be proud of. We are better positioned than any other nation in the world to win the economic competition of the 21st century,” Biden said in a speech before signing the law.

When the law was enacted, Brennen said, the focus was on producing leading-edge chips domestically and “trying to address the national security implications of the fact that a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, was the only one who could make the absolute best chips and recognizing that there’s a very complicated geopolitical situation there that opens up the country to a great deal of risk.”

The geopolitical risk Brennen spoke of stems from China’s claim to control of the island, which it calls a breakaway province.

In 2023, Biden signed an executive order on oversight of artificial intelligence. “This executive order represents bold action, but we still need Congress to act. We need Congress to act. I’m going to continue to call on Congress to pass bipartisan legislation to stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on our kids and teenagers online,” Biden exclaimed at his 2023 speech, “ban targeting, advertising to children, to limit the personal data these collectives, these companies collect on us. This landmark executive order is testament to what we stand for: safety, security, trust, openness.”

Brennen said this executive order kickstarted the process of thinking about guardrails around this powerful, new technology. “I think it did a lot of really important work on, like, basic knowledge building, standard-setting work, and really tried to thread this needle of not restricting innovation by really burdensome regulation. But also imposing at least a basic level of security to protect against the things that seemed like the highest-risk.”

Trump has said he will reverse that executive order and is expected to embrace a looser regulatory approach overall to tech. But, as Brennen also pointed out, he’s not always easy to predict.