The 2020 presidential race is over. Joe Biden has won the race for the presidency Here’s what it means for the biggest tech issues of the day.
Joe Biden has won the race for the presidency, unseating Donald Trump to take the White House. Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president, made history with his pick of Sen. Kamala Harris as his No. 2. Harris will become the first woman, and the first woman of color, to hold the office of vice president.
Multiple news outlets called the election on Saturday after projecting Biden would win Pennsylvania, giving him more than the 270 electoral votes needed. Vote counts took longer than in most years because states were deluged with mail-in ballots cast in record numbers by people avoid polling stations amid the coronavirus pandemic. Media outlets calling the race for Biden included CNN, Fox, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as ABC, CBS and NBC. Trump has said he will challenge the results.
Biden tweeted Saturday that he was “honored” to have won. “I promise you this,” he said, “I will be a President for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not.” Biden also changed his Twitter bio to read “President-Elect,” and Harris, who also tweeted, changed hers to read “Vice President-Elect.” In the tech realm, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder (and COVID watcher) Bill Gates all took to social media to offer their congratulations.
In a victory speech later in the day, Biden reiterated his promise to be a leader for all, and he urged the country to unite.
“It’s time to stop treating our opponents like they’re our enemies,” Biden told an energetic crowd in Delaware. “They are not our enemies. They are Americans.”
Biden also said he’d announce as soon as Monday a group of scientists and experts as transition advisors to help his administration fight the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused recession and dominated the political discussion over the bulk of the year.
Though the pandemic has pushed technology issues, including net neutrality, rural broadband and online privacy, to the sideline, battle lines have nonetheless been drawn over how to rein in big tech companies. As the influence and size of companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook have grown, lawmakers have questioned whether more regulation and reforms to antitrust law are needed.
Democrats are troubled by the rampant flow of hate speech and disinformation, including interference by foreign countries in the 2020 US presidential election. Republicans, led by Trump, allege their speech is being censored by social media sites. The companies strongly deny the claim.
Both sides say these companies have grown too big.
Of course, the most immediate issue President-elect Biden faces is the COVID-19 crisis, which has led to a rapid adoption of telemedicine and virtual education. The pandemic has also highlighted the digital divide that prevents millions of Americans from accessing high-speed internet.
Even though tech policy didn’t dominate election issues, Biden’s presence in the Oval Office over the next four years will have a major influence on the sector, including infrastructure policy on broadband deployment and national security issues involving China. The president and his team will also play a role in how to handle the growth and influence of social media giants. Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies are already feeling the heat from politicians on both sides of the political aisles.
During congressional hearings in July, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai were grilled about allegedly monopolistic practices. Zuckerberg, Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey were back on Capitol Hill in October facing tough questions from Democrats and Republicans over a key internet law that’s helped their businesses flourish.
So far, Biden has remained relatively quiet on tech. Harris, who hails from California, will likely be seen by the industry as more a friend than a foe because of her ties to Silicon Valley. But it’s hard to imagine Big Tech would enjoy the same kind of cozy relationship it had during the Obama administration.
Antitrust
The biggest issue facing tech companies under President Biden will be reforms to antitrust law meant to rein in the biggest tech companies.
A scathing 449-page congressional report detailing abuses of market power by Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook likely foreshadows troubles ahead for tech firms under a Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress. The report put together by a panel from the House Judiciary Committee laid out a road map for Congress to put the brakes on the dominance of the nation’s four largest tech companies.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice under President Trump filed a landmark lawsuit last month against Google, accusing the tech giant of illegally holding monopolies in search and search advertising. The suit was the culmination of a more than yearlong investigation into alleged anticompetitive practices at the company and the first such antitrust case in the tech world in decades.
It’s unclear how far a Biden Justice Department will be willing to go in terms of antitrust enforcement and reforms. While Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts who ran for the Democratic nomination for president, pushed to break up big tech companies, Biden has said it’s too early to talk about breaking up companies and instead has leaned toward regulation as a way to curb their power.
Still, it’s clear that the US government has put big tech under more intense scrutiny as attitudes toward Silicon Valley companies have changed dramatically from just a few years ago, when Google and Facebook were hailed as American success stories. Now, that dominance has turned against these companies.
Liability protections: Section 230
There isn’t much that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill agree on. Reforming Section 230, a decades old law, is on that short list. The law protects Google, Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants from lawsuits over the content their users post on their platforms.
Last month, Zuckerberg, Pichai and Dorsey appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee to discuss the law, although much of the talk focused on lawmaker complaints rather than substantive reforms. Biden has been an outspoken critic of Section 230, which is part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Democrats, like Biden, say Facebook and other companies are getting off too easy when bad actors use their platforms to disseminate disinformation and hate speech, as well as interfere in elections.
Biden told The New York Times that Section 230 “immediately should be revoked” for Facebook and other platforms. “It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy,” he said.
Meanwhile, Republicans accuse social media giants of censoring conservatives online. In the weeks leading up to the election, Trump tweeted “REPEAL SECTION 230!!!” after Facebook and Twitter slowed the spread of a New York Post story that contained unverified claims concerning Biden’s son.
All of this comes as the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission considers writing new regulations for Section 230 that would penalize companies for censoring content. A Biden Administration is likely to put the kibosh on the FCC’s efforts to write rules to police social media companies. Instead, he’s likely to look to Congress for answers.
Originally published at cnet