How will the candidates regulate big tech?

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How will the candidates regulate big tech?

The US presidential election is in its final stretch. Before election day on November 5, Engadget is looking at where the candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, stand on the most consequential tech issues of our day.

The Biden administration has been more aggressive than almost any in recent ********* history in its antitrust efforts. In the tech sector alone, it has ongoing cases against Apple, Meta,

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and

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, not to mention its battles with Ticketmaster,

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, Kroger, CVS, Visa, Penguin Random House and more. Biden,

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(chair of the FTC) and Jonathan Kanter (head of the DOJ’s antitrust division) have spent the last several years working to prevent giant mergers, increase competition and punish companies (however lightly) for unfair business practices. It is unlikely that whoever succeeds Joe Biden will be quite as fervent in their ****** against monopolies. That being said, it’s not only possible but probable that either a Harris or Trump administration would be very active in the antitrust field.

Kamala Harris

There is some expectation that a Kamala Harris White House will pursue these sorts of cases less aggressively. Part of that assumption is simply down to the fact that Harris hasn’t said a ton on the issue. She touts her record as attorney general of California in

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, and says during her

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that “companies need to play by the rules, respect the rights of workers and unions and abide by fair competition. And if they don’t, I will hold them accountable.” But she often doesn’t get more specific than that.

Her campaign also released a detailed

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, though it makes little mention of antitrust and antimonopoly proposals. When it does discuss those issues, it focuses exclusively on landlords, grocery stores and the pharmaceutical industry. It does advocate for the passage of the

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, though. This bill would make it ******** for landlords to use software from companies like RealPage and Yardi to coordinate on housing prices and rent increases.

However, Harris’ ties to Silicon Valley has led some to believe she would pump the brakes on antitrust efforts focused on the tech industry. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, is chief legal officer for Uber, her debate adviser was Karen Dunn, the lawyer currently heading up

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’s defense in an ongoing antitrust case, and she counts

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(widow of Steve Jobs) among her closest friends. She’s also been quiet in the face of calls from major donors like Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and Barry Diller (IAC, Expedia Group and TripAdvisor) to *****

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.

Nonetheless, she has also surrounded herself with many people deeply engaged in the

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, including Brian Deese, the former head of the National Economic Council (NEC); Rachel Brown, who led on competition policy at the NEC and Bharat Ramamurti, who was not only Deese’s deputy at the NEC but also worked for Elizabeth Warren, who has made fighting big business a cornerstone of her political identity. It’s unlikely these antitrust crusaders would join Harris’ campaign if they did not believe she would continue the work of the Biden administration in some meaningful capacity.

Donald Trump

Unlike what you’d expect from a typical *********** administration, the Trump White House was actually pretty active in the antitrust space, focusing primarily on the tech and healthcare industries. Trump has made no secret of his animosity towards some of the biggest players in the tech space, so there’s little reason to believe he’d scale back or abandon the cases against

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, Apple, Meta and

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underway.

During his first tenure, the Trump administration went after

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over its

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and

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following its

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in antimonopoly cases. He also sought to block the acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T. Even after he left the White House, Trump continued his ******** on big tech by filing personal lawsuits against

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,

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and

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,

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. According to

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(an antitrust think tank), while *********** administrations tend to prioritize ********* cartel cases, the Trump DOJ pursued fewer of those than any administration since Nixon and focused more on mergers and antimonopoly cases.

While Trump hasn’t said much about his antitrust views on the campaign trail, his running mate, JD Vance, has made it a regular topic of his stump speeches. Vance has voiced strong support for breaking up big corporations, especially in the tech industry. He’s even praised Lina Khan as “

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”

Complicating this, however, under Trump, the DOJ and FTC were constantly mired in

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, and he was routinely accused of using the agencies to

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. To make things even murkier, there is no mention of antitrust or antimonopoly efforts or policies either on Trump’s

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site or the official

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. This makes it difficult to predict what to expect from a second Trump term. While there was significant antitrust activity on his watch, at times it seemed guided by political whims and personal vendettas. And without a guiding principle outlined in any official policy document, it’s impossible to know what avenues the DOJ and FTC might focus on to go after companies that find themselves the target of Trump’s ire.

While Donald Trump and the RNC don’t spill too many words discussing antitrust issues, the Heritage Foundation’s

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document does. It notes there is still some disagreement among Republicans on how aggressively to pursue antitrust action. But it focuses extensively on the changing view within the party that seeks more aggressive actions to break up the largest players in the market.

While Project 2025 pays some lip service to the negative impact on consumers of having too much industry power concentrated in too few hands, it spends most of its time discussing ESG (environmental, social and governance) and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives by businesses as a non-economic reason to pursue antitrust efforts, suggesting the Heritage Foundation sees antimonopoly laws not as a way to prevent the concentration of economic power, but as a cudgel to punish those promoting social and political ideologies it dislikes.

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#candidates #regulate #big #tech

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