For almost two years, the Democrats steering the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel have been laying the groundwork for the first overhaul of U.S. antitrust law in decades, with Big Tech as the main target.
“If there’s one thing Congress should be doing—and Congress could do it even under divided government—it’s to fix antitrust law so it’s not completely meaningless,” says Sohn. This could mean breaking up companies deemed anti-competitive through such means as severing Instagram from Facebook or requiring Apple and Amazon to stop competing with the independent businesses that rely on their digital and physical delivery networks. Democrats could also pick up efforts to create a federal data privacy law.
The chances of a maximally aggressive approach dimmed when Democrats didn’t handily win control of the Senate, as some had expected. The news was enough to send tech stocks soaring on Wednesday, even though control of the White House was still up in the air. Still, the energy for change lies with Democrats who are worried about the concentration of economic power. “Both on the merits and the politics, our perspective is ascendant,” says Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, a group pushing for more aggressive antitrust laws and enforcement.
This is a striking change from the Obama years, when Democrats lauded Silicon Valley as a key driver of innovation and sought to reshape government and other aspects of the economy in its image. A string of senior administration officials left to work for Big Tech, and in a 2016 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Obama hinted that his post-presidency might include trying his hand as a venture capitalist.
The trend seemed set to continue into a Hillary Clinton administration, whose proposed tech policy agenda focused on industry-friendly issues including patent reform and net neutrality. It was common at the time to marvel at software’s ability to change the world for the better, according to Ari Wallach, a futurist who was part of Clinton’s disruptive economy working group. “In 2016 it was ‘Let’s algorithm-ize everything,’ ” he says.
The 2016 presidential election saw a new antipathy toward the tech giants begin to crystallize among the liberal political class, as it highlighted how much power social media companies had over political discourse and just how big a few Silicon Valley companies had become. Today, many Democratic politicians see the term “algorithm” as a dirty word, associated with racially biased predictive policing and engagement-obsessed news feeds. Biden doesn’t even have a disruptive economy working group.
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