Tech Week: Big Tech CEOs Fight against Donald Trump, His Imbalanced China, and the Loss of American Jobs in the Age of Competition
On Wednesday, the chief executives of the leading Big Tech companies congratulated the President-elect. Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Tim Cook (Apple), Andy Jassy (Amazon), and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) have all sparred with Donald Trump before, but they were quick to get behind him as their companies face a fresh four years of operating under an influential politician who has proved volatile.
Big tech companies have been shown disdain by Trump, he has advocated policies that would increase the cost of doing business for Big Tech and put them in worse shape than before. Ahead of the election, business leaders and venture capitalists expressed concern that an unpredictable administration would undermine the stability of their businesses.
And now, with Elon Musk as his biggest supporter, “this might be a moment in which there’s a picking of favorites amongst the big tech players,” says Betsy Cooper, director of the Aspen Policy Academy.
Trump is promising to deport hundreds of thousands of people, and his China tariffs could cause severe price hikes for goods imported from that country, which will cause chaos in America. How far the administration will go is an open question, and one that makes predicting the future with any certainty — inside and outside the tech industry — difficult to do.
Bernstein stated in a bullish note that Apple could be less vulnerable than initial reading suggests because of the company’s ability to absorb higher tariffs. Apple has also been diversifying its supply chain by producing products in different regions, like Vietnam.
The Kids Online Safety Act: What Will Congress Do if Trump Presiders Revisite or Reconsidered the Impact of a Republican Presidency?
A Trump administration and Republican legislature could rework the Section 230 liability shield to let them actually punish companies for moderation decisions. Brendan Carr mentioned in his Project-2055 chapter that the FCC could do a better job of controlling content by narrowing its protections for a broad range of decisions. Ultimately, any executive or legislative changes to online speech rules could face the Supreme Court, which has so far upheld the right to conduct content moderation, although it signaled openness to potential legal changes in the future.
The Kids Online Safety Act (Kotas) is a leading congressional bill on the subject, and has yet to be said much by Trump. That bill remains stalled in the House after passing through the Senate (in combination with an update to children’s data privacy law), and it’s not yet clear what could happen in future congressional sessions. The Republican leadership of the House doesn’t like the bill due to its impact on speech, so a Democratic House may be more willing to give it floor time, but the concerns do not fall entirely on partisan lines.
Adam Kovacevich, whose group has opposed KOSA, suggests Democrats should be wary of passing the bill under a Trump presidency — pointing to lead cosponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) comments about protecting kids from transgender content online. “Democrats will have to decide whether they want to hand Trump & MAGA state law enforcers a powerful new censorship tool,” he writes.
It is likely that EV tax credits and other policies focused on climate will be in danger under Trump, but it is unclear if he will make any changes to his connections with Musk. Still, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives previously said that Tesla’s “scale and scope … could give Musk and Tesla a clear competitive advantage in a non-EV subsidy environment.”
Under the Biden administration, Congress passed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which injected funds into creating a domestic semiconductor production industry — something experts say is a national security necessity and critical to maintaining control over the supply chain for important technologies including medical tech. But Trump called the bill “so bad” during his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and soon after, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he was open to repealing the law (though he later walked back those comments). Trump can’t undo a law on his own, but he could perhaps instruct his Commerce Department to slow-walk aspects of its rollout.
Trump has made significant overtures to the cryptocurrency industry, headlining a major Bitcoin conference this summer and picking up significant support from prominent crypto investors like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The industry is likely to get its biggest wish: the removal of Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, whom the industry views as its main antagonist. Expect more hands-off regulation of this industry, as President Trump has called for the US to become a huge player in the digital economy.
Conservatives have long been complaining about the suppression of conservative speech on social media platforms and accusing them of being under pressure from government to remove information that is not true. Meta loosened their moderation standards even before his reelection.
It’s not totally clear yet how Trump’s FCC will handle other key broadband policy issues, including the rollout of the government’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) infrastructure investment program. But once again, Elon Musk’s influence could become important here. Musk runs the satellite internet company Starlink, which has been passed over for some government contracts, but could lobby for more favorable policies under Trump. For example, the BEAD program currently favors fiber broadband, and Musk has critiqued the program as an “outrageous waste of taxpayer money.”
Dean writes that a Republican-led FCC will likely loosen broadcast merger and acquisition rules. Republican FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, who served during the first Trump administration, has called for big tech companies to pay into the Universal Service Fund — currently funded by telecommunications providers — and suggested punishing TV networks under broadcasting rules.
Net neutrality is likely dead under a Trump administration because of the fight it already faces in the courts. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Dean predicts a 90 percent chance Trump’s Federal Communications Commission abandons the effort to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers and subject them to greater regulatory scrutiny.
Source: What a second Trump presidency means for tech
How Trump can use the FTC chair position to help tech companies: The case for a new approximation to the Dvection Act after Trump leaves office
It could have major ramifications for companies that depend a lot on China such as Apple, or for companies that rely on China for components used in their businesses. But because of that connection, this is another area where Elon Musk’s influence could be a wild card.
If the DC Circuit decides to uphold the law and the Supreme Court declines to take it up or upholds that ruling, what Trump can do is somewhat limited. Under the law, he must certify to Congress that there is a plan underway in order to give Byte Dance an extension for 90 days. The law does leave the president some discretion to determine whether more apps besides TikTok fall under the divestiture law’s purview and what represents an adequate separation. Trump can’t just disregard the statute because TikTok is written into it.
While business leaders may be relieved if Khan leaves the FTC, Rie says we shouldn’t expect “a return to the relaxed antitrust climate of 10 years ago … some aspects of the current aggressive approach will stick. Republicans no longer uniformly lean more business-friendly than Democrats.” She says that merger approvals may become swifter and the revised guidelines could be in trouble as a result.
The legal battles against Meta,google, Apple, and Amazon will likely continue after Trump leaves office. Depending on who Donald Trump appoints, it could try to pursue more modest remedies. If cases aren’t going well for the agencies, a small increase in settlement prospects is possible down the road. We didn’t expect the situation to happen and Trump doesn’t believe in broken up the internet company. Trump could use the cases to leverage the companies to get better treatment of speech and content concerns.
It is not certain how much sway the VP pick of Trump will have in regards to the stance of the FTC Chair. If he does get a say here, we could expect a continued crackdown on big tech firms to benefit “little tech” or startups that VCs like Andreessen Horowitz (another Trump supporter) want to see rocket with growth.
Also, those of us covering tech will definitely wind up reporting on the Trump presidency; policy as always affects the course of technology. (Remember, the US government produced that thing called the internet.) A debate rages about whether or not we should regulate or restrain Artificial intelligence, a technology that some refer to as the last invention. The new administration will not be implementing the executive order that Joe Biden ordered. Musk, who is advising the new president on artificial intelligence and has his own company that builds it, could have an outsize influence on the policies of the government. Some people have speculated that the movement to regulate AI could be trumped by the threat of China. That’s important, because the ground rules of today’s AI, and the quirks of its inventors, may affect whether the worst fears about the technology come true.
The next four years of tech policy will be unpredictable. As he tries to expand his authority, he will need support from the courts and Congress. We will be keeping a close watch on what Trump can do as he reassumes the presidency.
Trump has a lot of power because he has ousted some former supporters who tried to be too restraint, and his allies have a long list of plans to change the administrative state.
Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed tone-deaf, if not futile. I wrote a column to answer that impulse on a plane, directed as much to myself and my colleagues as it was to readers. I argued that regardless of the enormity of this event, one thing hadn’t changed; the biggest story of our time was still the technological revolution we were living through. Disruptive politicians, even destructive ones, may come and go—or refuse to go. The chip, network, mobile device, and all they contained was changing humanity and what it means to be a human. Our job was to document that epic transformation no matter who the leader was. The column title was “The iPhone is Bigger Than Donald Trump.”
This week, Trump was once again elected president despite … I won’t go through the list of disqualifiers. To the majority of voters it doesn’t matter. There is an unbelievable story, and the next few years will probably be the most significant in history. Maybe not in a good way. Maybe in a very bad way for a country where many expected to celebrate its continuing values on America’s 250th birthday. (In the spirit of unity, I’ll use the “maybe” qualifier since losers should be humble, and who knows what’s ahead.)
Yet I’m not budging from the thought I had in 2016. Stewart Brand once said that science and change were the causes of changing the world irreversibly. What is happening in technology and science remains the activity that will ultimately make the biggest impact on our species. Hundreds of years later, future generations (and possibly Ray Kurzweil) will look back at this time and identify it as the period when microchips and neural net software changed everything. Who was the strongman who destroyed the country that used to occupy real estate in the Western Hemisphere? I no longer run a publication and instead represent but a single voice in a much larger staff. (For WIRED’s institutional view, please note the words of my boss, which I endorse.) I repeated my statement of purpose a second time, with a slight change: Artificial intelligence is bigger than Donald Trump.
Journalists must cover Trump more vigorously and with greater demands for accountability. For some of us codgers it may be our last term, but what happens in our community will have a bigger influence on our daily lives than the latest version of Apple Intelligence. (Sorry, Tim Apple.) If you lose your health care, or your reproductive rights, or find yourself in a deportation camp or a prison cell because of the policies of our returning president, the knowledge that AI, mixed reality, and quantum computers might one day redefine us won’t lessen the pain.
After Donald Trump was reelected, I went to meet the leaders of the company and interview a top engineer. I thought of the election results when I walked back to the office. As long as I keep my heart beating, I’ll finish the article and do another about that company. It is still the biggest story in town.
