Joe Biden’s tech task force may be surprisingly critical of Silicon Valley’s power – By Matthew Rozsa (Salon) / Nov 10 2020
Early indications suggest that Biden may make some headway in reforming America’s powerful Big Tech industry
One rare political arena with bipartisan support is the movement to break up and curb the power of tech giants, particularly those operating in search and social media. Early reports indicate that President-elect Joe Biden is aware of this, and that his upcoming policy agenda may reflect that.
Some of these reports come directly from the Biden campaign itself, with former head of press Bill Russo retweeting “Hell yes” to a Sacha Baron Cohen post that depicted outgoing President Donald Trump alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg paired with the caption, “One down, one to go.” There are also reports from reputable outlets like The New York Times, which on Tuesday revealed that Biden is not only expected to pursue an antitrust lawsuit filed against Google last month, but may pursue additional antitrust cases against Amazon, Apple and Facebook.
“Many technology giants and their executives have not only abused their power, but misled the American people, damaged our democracy and evaded any form of responsibility,” a Biden campaign spokesman told the Times. “That ends with a President Biden.”
This approach would mark a sharp contrast with how Big Tech was treated by the former president with whom Biden is closely tied, Barack Obama. Perhaps epitomizing Obama’s laissez-faire approach to Silicon Valley, many of Obama’s top advisors ended up working for tech companies after his administration concluded. Yet as former Obama tech adviser Tim Wu told the Financial Times, “There has been a shift since the Obama administration, even among the people working in that administration, in the way they think about power in the tech world. Obama came to power in 2008 — Google was pretty small in the tech industry, so was Facebook, no one knew if they would survive. Both the facts and the tenor have changed.”
