Trump Is Coming for Tech Companies
President Joe Biden’s administration has been horrible for tech companies. The incoming Trump administration may be just as bad.
That’s disappointing, if not really surprising. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, he frequently railed against big tech companies via his social media accounts, called for European-style regulation of tech businesses, and set out to ban TikTok, while the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Google and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Facebook. And incoming vice president J.D. Vance hasn’t just been critical of major tech companies; he has praised current FTC head Lina Khan, who has aggressively pursued those companies using an expansionist concept of antitrust law.
Trump has occasionally deviated from this anti-tech stance, as when he criticized more recent efforts to ban TikTok. And many Republicans have been highly critical of Khan’s FTC, kindling some small hope that the incoming Trump administration would do things differently.
But last week Trump smothered any hope that he had changed his stance when it comes to American tech companies. It looks like we can expect the aggressive attacks via antitrust law to continue.
“Make America Competitive Again”
In announcing Gail Slater as his pick to lead the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Trump opined that “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech! I was proud to fight these abuses in my First Term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership.” Slater, he continued, “will help ensure that our competition laws are enforced, both vigorously and FAIRLY, with clear rules that facilitate, rather than stifle, the ingenuity of our greatest companies. Congratulations Gail – Together, we will Make America Competitive Again!”
That might sound OK. Who doesn’t like fair competition?
But under both Trump 1.0 and Biden, “competition” served as a euphemism for a marketplace in which the federal government decides which businesses win and lose.
Big tech companies—politically unpopular on both the right and the left, albeit often for differing reasons—have been branded by both sides as undeserving of their successes. Without legitimate criminal acts to go after or traditional antitrust violations to stop, politicians have taken to applying antitrust laws more expansively. This might mean slagging big tech companies for thwarting their competitors (which is kind of the whole point of business, no?) or suggesting that antitrust law means things it doesn’t (like requiring tech companies to maintain some sort of speech neutrality).
While the Biden-era FTC has been most aggressive toward tech companies, it has applied its expansive antitrust agenda—one that no longer considers consumer harm as the lodestar of antitrust enforcement—to all sorts of businesses. It’s unclear whether the Trump-Vance administration will continue down that path or if it will embrace a Khan-style agenda only in the tech industry.
Antitrust Hawks and ‘Free Speech’ Warriors
In his most recent column at Reason, Steven Greenhut suggests that there isn’t “a dime’s worth of difference between conservative populism and democratic socialism” when it comes to antitrust enforcement. Greenhut notes that several of the antitech antitrust cases pursued by the Biden administration were inherited from Trump. “It’s my hope that the Trump administration takes a more market-oriented approach toward antitrust law, but it’s unlikely given the origin of the cases,” he writes.
It’s not just Trump’s words that don’t inspire confidence in a change from Khan-era policies. His pick to head the DOJ antitrust division is an “antitrust hawk,” accor
Article from Reason.com
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