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President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden don’t agree on many issues, but they do share a wariness toward Big Tech that should maintain or even escalate antitrust scrutiny of the largest U.S. tech companies no matter who wins on Nov. 3.
In the middle of antitrust investigations into four of the most prominent companies in the world — Alphabet Inc.’s Google GOOGL, +1.21% , GOOG, +1.17% Facebook Inc. FB, +1.47% , Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +1.50% , and Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.38% — both Trump and Biden have stopped short of calling for companies to be broken up. But their animus toward an industry that has grown to be distrusted by many Americans reflects a golden rule in politics: Run against the corporate boogeyman.
Democrats and Republicans have approached tech issues with different motivations in recent years, but will continue the “techlash” for at least four more years because it’s what the public wants to counterbalance the industry’s growing market power and cultural influence, Capital Alpha Partners analyst Robert Kaminsky told MarketWatch. Republicans have focused their agenda on what they deem an anticonservative bias on social-media platforms, while Democrats are pivoting toward anticompetitive business practices and consumer-privacy rights, and the winners in November will determine the direction of the response.
“I see no end to bipartisan criticism of Big Tech,” Kaminsky said.
The Trump administration has threatened broad regulatory actions against internet companies for what the president and other Republicans claim is anticonservative bias, while maintaining antitrust investigations of Google and Facebook, and fighting in the courts for bans on Chinese-owned apps such as TikTok and WeChat.
Trump’s Justice Department is reportedly close to filing a lawsuit against Google’s search and advertising business before the election that likely would spill over into the next administration. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, is preparing a possible lawsuit against Facebook by the end of the year over unspecified antitrust violations. The FTC continues its probe of Amazon, while the status of the Justice Department’s investigation of Apple remains unclear.
For more: Big Tech turning on one another amid antitrust probes and litigation
Biden, who was vice president during the Silicon Valley-friendly administration of President Barack Obama, has been critical of Big Tech’s market power. He supports stringent antitrust oversight and online privacy rules, but leans heavily toward forcing social-media companies to better police their sites against false information. Biden has proposed a minimum federal tax aimed at companies like Amazon, and vowed government action to help workers under threat from innovations such as self-driving cars.
Here is how the two main 2020 presidential candidates stack up on the issues.
Breaking Up Big Tech
Despite the lineage of a pro-Silicon Valley Obama administration that has some conservatives and progressives fretting that Biden would settle antitrust cases if elected, a campaign spokesman strongly suggested otherwise.
“Joe Biden has long said one of the greatest sins is the abuse of power,” Matt Hill told The Wall Street Journal in September. “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. That ends with a President Biden.”
A policy task force Biden created with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., recommends breaking up companies for anticompetitive behavior, but only “as a last resort.”
See also: Here’s where Trump and Biden stand on China and other trade issues
Trump, who routinely bashes Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos — who also owns the Washington Post — has established civil relations with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But he has been vague when asked about Big Tech, saying, “There is something going on in terms of monopoly.” Still, one possible outcome of the federal government’s continuing antitrust investigations is breaking up companies.
The administration also finds itself entangled in a legal dispute between Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.82% , which was awarded a 10-year, $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon, and Amazon, whose executives are convinced the deal was awarded for political reasons.
Social Media Regulation
Social-media companies have felt the rhetorical sting of both presidential candidates, largely around one of the only major laws governing the internet that the federal government has managed to pass.
Even though Trump benefited greatly from an aggressive digital campaign to win the White House in 2016, he continues to claim — in tweets — that platforms unfairly censor conservative viewpoints. Things spiraled in May, when Twitter Inc. TWTR, +3.36% slapped fact-checking labels on Trump tweets for the first time, prompting the president to threaten to introduce legislation that would weaken Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 federal law that exempts online platforms from legal liability for material users post, for the most part. Trump subsequently called for repeal of Section 230 in a Sept. 8 tweet. Neither action has had much effect.
Read: Here’s where Trump and Biden stand on health care
On Thursday, the Republican-run Senate Commerce Committee voted to subpoena Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to appear for a hearing on Section 230. Committee chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said the hearing, which has no assigned date, would be to address allegations of anticonservative bias on social-media platforms.
Biden, who has criticized Facebook’s policies on political ads and manipulated videos, was the only Democratic presidential candidate who called for revoking Section 230 in the primaries. On Tuesday, the Biden campaign eviscerated Facebook as “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process” in a letter to Zuckerberg lamenting Facebook’s refusal to remove voting misinformation posted by Trump.
The differing views on Section 230 highlights contrasting political approaches.
“Whenever you have a platform dealing with content, there will be an argument over removal of content, which is the Republicans’ view, vs. failure to remove content, which is where the Democrats stand,” Paven Malhotra, a Silicon Valley attorney who specializes in intellectual property, told MarketWatch. “Nonetheless, I expect a groundswell of movement next year by both parties to modify 230.”
Data Privacy
As Congress wends its way toward federal consumer privacy legislation, Biden has voiced support for national privacy “standards not unlike the Europeans,” an apparent reference to the European Union’s strict General Data Protection Regulation.
The Trump administration, in turn, has criticized Silicon Valley over the issue of encryption. The president called for a boycott of Apple early in his presidency for the company’s refusal to unlock iPhones used by mass shooters in San Bernardino, Calif., and has continued to push that issue.
For more: Here’s where Trump and Biden stand on climate change
In recent months, the Trump administration has ramped up attacks on GDPR, calling it a restrictive system that provides cover to cybercriminals and threatens public health.
“We do have serious concerns about its [the GDPR’s] overly restrictive implications for public safety and law enforcement,” U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Cyber Rob Strayer, told Politico in late June. “We definitely find that divergent interpretations [of the law] are also an issue, chilling some of the commerce that could be taking place.”
High-speed Broadband Access
The pandemic has forced millions of Americans to work from home and attend school, putting a premium on high-speed broadband and exposing inequalities in availability of the technology nationally.
Both candidates support some plan to bring ultrafast connections to everyone: The FTC in January approved a $20 billion rural broadband expansion fund, while Biden said he plans a $20 billion investment in rural broadband infrastructure as part of a package his team proposed to spend money collected from tax increases on wealthy Americans.
Gig Jobs
Biden has suggested using government regulation to force “gig economy” businesses to pay for benefits to their independent contractors by reclassifying them as employees.The Trump campaign claims a California gig-worker law that does that will “take away workers’ opportunity to make their own schedules and participate in a free and open gig economy.”
The Labor Department, led by Trump appointee Eugene Scalia, last year said people offering services on online sites or apps should be considered employees of the consumer who hires them, making it difficult for gig workers to win labor disputes.
See also: How Trump and Biden tax policies could affect your paycheck
