Will Biden Fight or Back Off?
The Biden-Harris transition team lists four top priorities for the incoming administration. Reforming the American tech sector is not one of them.
That’s understandable. Given the scale of the challenges facing the country and world, it would be hard to argue that Biden should have anything higher on his list than the four things he’s focused on: responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, promoting economic recovery, working toward greater racial equity, and combatting climate change.
But all of these challenges intersect with Big Tech, and in particular with the social media platforms that shape so many Americans’ understanding of what our most significant national problems are (or are not).
When it comes to these platforms, as well as other pressing technological issues of the moment, some see Biden as a “blank slate.” Because of this, they view the transition period, and the rapid staffing up it requires, as a key battlefield in the fight over whether the incoming president will end up listening to powerful voices from inside, or outside, of Silicon Valley.
The image of Biden as a tech tabula rasa may not be entirely accurate. In an interview with The New York Times editorial board last year, candidate Biden revealed a few strong opinions, as well as a deep unhappiness with at least one aspect of our digital present.
Asked by a member of the board about an online misinformation effort that had targeted his campaign on Facebook, Biden responded: “I’ve never been a fan of Facebook.” Making it even more personal, he added: “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem.”
Biden went on to express a belief that Zuckerberg knew about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election in real time. That’s not the understanding of events Facebook has promoted. Biden also said Facebook should be forced to take more responsibility for the information it spreads, and on that point he laid down one clear policy marker.
“Section 230 should be revoked, immediately,” Biden told the Times. That puts the incoming president in agreement with the outgoing president on the very consequential question of what to do about the tech industry’s long-running, much-criticized shield against legal consequence for the digital content it hosts and amplifies.
But beyond Biden’s frustration with Zuckerberg and his eagerness to repeal Section 230, the president elect’s positions remain murky. That leaves many people trying to divine his true tech intentions from the tea leaves of his transition picks.
As Biden continues to make picks for this tech braintrust, two interesting clashes have emerged. One is the aforementioned argument over whether the president elect’s transition team (and, eventually, his administration) should be stocked with insiders or outsiders. For example, should former Google CEO Eric Schmidt be appointed to a new tech industry taskforce that may advise the Biden administration?
No way, said a coalition of progressive groups in a November 17 letter to Biden after word of a possible Schmidt appointment surfaced.
“While the appointment of Schmidt may attract praise from certain elites in both Washington and Silicon Valley,” the signers wrote, “it risks alienating an overwhelming majority of the electorate, including within the Democratic base, who want to see the economic power of major corporations reined in.”
Already, Biden transition team members with strong ties to Big Tech make up a sizable list, raising alarm bells about the possibility they’ll be able to mold the new president’s agenda to Big Tech’s liking before he even steps into the Oval Office. Google, Facebook, and Amazon, all of which will be greatly affected by antitrust policies and actions during the Biden administration, each have people with close ties in transition team posts. But on antitrust issues, Biden is also being guided by a transition adviser who, as The Information put it, “brawls with Big Tech.”
Seeking to tamp down progressive concerns about the transition staff, a Biden spokesperson said in a statement to The New York Times:
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. Anyone who thinks that campaign volunteers or advisers will change Joe Biden’s fundamental commitment to stopping the abuse of power and stepping up for the middle class doesn’t know Joe Biden.
A second conflict is brewing over whether the nation’s current tech challenges are so unique, and so thorny and complex, that Biden should push for the creation of an entirely new agency to tackle them.
The argument in favor of a “Digital Platform Commission,” as laid out recently by former Facebook data scientist Roddy Lindsay, is that in many ways our new digital methods of communication “simply have no analogue” among our past ways of sharing information. Online platforms are not television. They’re not radio. They’re not providing cable or internet service to homes. These platforms are, as Zuckerberg recently told Congress, “a new industry.”
Who presently regulates digital platforms in America?
“You might say everyone and no one,” TechCrunch explained earlier this year.
Hence, the idea of one agency devoted only to this big, pressing, and exceedingly complicated problem. “It is not enough,” a recent Brookings Institution report supporting a new agency said, “to re-task industrial era federal agencies to oversee the digital giants. These agencies are full of dedicated professionals, but they operate on precedents and procedures built for another era when technology and innovation moved at a slower pace. In place of such industrial era muscle memory, we need a purpose-built federal agency with digital DNA.”
Although there’s intense interest around antitrust enforcement right now, that alone won’t get us where we need to be, the Brookings report warned, because it is by definition slow and backward-looking. An agency staffed with digital experts could quickly end the rules-free era for tech giants and immediately begin crafting forward-looking regulations that serve the public interest.
Others warn a new agency would be “a disaster,” in part because specialized agencies tend to be more vulnerable to “regulatory capture,” in which the regulated companies come to exert a far more powerful sway over their supposed regulators than any concern for the public good.
But the Brookings report, which proposes a new “Digital Platform Agency,” argues that history is on its side:
Congress has traditionally created new expert agencies to oversee new technology platforms. Whether the Interstate Commerce Commission (railroads), Federal Communications Commission (broadcasting), Federal Aviation Administration (air transport), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (finance), or any other of the alphabet agencies, the precedent is clear: new technologies require specialized oversight.
Whatever Biden ends up deciding, he does seem to share the sense that we are experiencing a historically dislocating leap in our technological capabilities, broadly similar to the advent of railways, television, or air travel, but far more disruptive.
“The fact is, in every other revolution that we’ve had technologically, it’s taken somewhere between six years and a generation for a government to come in and level the playing field again,” Biden told The New York Times editorial board. The present technological revolution is “gigantic” compared to those others, he said, “and it’s a responsibility of government to make sure it is not abused.”
A few things that caught my eye since the last letter:
• “News ecosystem quality” — Facebook has the ability to improve the caliber of the news its users see. All the company has to do is tweak its algorithm. During the run-up to Election Day, it made a tweak to improve “news ecosystem quality,” but then Facebook went back to business as usual. Some employees wish it would have made the pre-election change permanent.
• “Political White List” — Maybe someone’s hunch (or private tip) about something like this existing was behind all those demands for secret Facebook “lists” at last week’s Senate hearing?
• “Superspreaders” — According to new research, “a small group of social media accounts are responsible for the spread of a disproportionate amount of the false posts about voter fraud.”
• “False and misleading” — A group of Democratic Senators is asking the very lax folks at YouTube to take action against videos supporting Trump’s election conspiracy theories.
Questions? Tips? Comments? wildwestnewsletter@gmail.com