Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump on tech, AI, and antitrust

The debate reminds us that the presidential candidates barely talk about tech. So where do they stand?

Greetings machine breakers, and welcome to this week’s edition of Blood in the Machine. I’ve been meaning to write about the presidential candidates’ tech policies and relationships to Silicon Valley—especially Harris’s, which have flown under the radar somewhat—and the debate makes for as good an opportunity as any to dive in. As always, thank you for reading, subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project. Paid subscribers are what make this all possible—if you are able, the cost of a cup of coffee a month means I can keep doing this writing—and I’m grateful for every one of you. Onwards, and hammers up.

The consensus seems to be that Kamala Harris won the first presidential debate, though as ever, we’re left interrogating what ‘winning’ a debate against Donald Trump even means. Harris appeared composed and authoritative, and did not bellow conspiracy theories about immigrants eating people’s pets or ramble on about Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban or say the words “I have a concept of a plan” when asked about policy proposals, and so was de facto triumphant.

One subject that was barely touched on, in logorrheic screed form or otherwise, was tech policy. Harris mentioned the trade deficit Trump ran up with China, lambasted him for selling American chips to China’s military, and offered a platitude about the US needing to stay ahead on AI and innovation, but that was about the extent of it. In fact, the most consequential discussion of AI—which lawmakers are struggling to grapple with and regulate across the country—came not from either of the candidates, but after the debate, from Taylor Swift. The pop star announced that an AI deepfake someone made of her to falsify her endorsement of Trump was a reason she decided to publicly back Harris.

So where do the candidates stand on AI and tech policy more broadly? Such things have clearly not been either campaign’s focus, but are well worth considering. As such, here’s a look at where each candidate stands on tech policy, AI, and antitrust issues. We might not need a vivid imagination to intuit what another Trump term might hold; Harris is trickier. I’ve been watching, uneasily, some of the moves she’s made over the last months, and do worry she’d be softer on Silicon Valley than Biden on a few key fronts.

But first, let’s consider a second round of Trump.

Photos by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr. Trump in 2016. Harris in 2019.

Donald Trump on deregulation, Elon Musk, and profiteering from tacky tech

We already know, by and large, what tech policy looks like under a Trump administration. It looks like less regulation—his FCC tore up net neutrality rules, for one thing—and more corporate tax cuts, which Trump says he plans to extend when his last round expires in 2025. It means NFTs of the former president that cost $99 each, or more, if you want them to come with a piece of one of his old suits.

If anything, a second term would likely be better for big tech. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is a former venture capitalist, and has deep ties to the chief conservative tech guru, metaphorical and literal vampire Peter Thiel. This may or may not have anything to do with why the Trump campaign pledged to dissolve Biden’s executive order on AI, which called for some minimal guardrails and oversight. As the 2024 Trump Republican platform adopted at the RNC puts it: “We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”

Meanwhile, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas struck down the Biden FTC’s rule banning noncompete agreements, a tool widely wielded by tech company management to tamp down worker power in Silicon Valley. And, naturally, Trump has recently recast himself as a cryptocurrency champion, promising to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet,” while, in true Trumpian fashion, simultaneously launching a crypto company to personally capitalize on his position.

The only complicating factor here is that Trump publicly soured on big tech after he lost the election, and was banned from Twitter and suspended from Facebook after his posts were determined to have violated their rules in the wake of the January 6th riots. Trump turned to his own misbegotten social media network, Truth Social, where, in one of the more surreal moments of my career, he posted an article I wrote about the challenges facing Silicon Valley, reflecting his animosity towards the industry. (It remains the only good thing Trump has ever posted to social media.¹)

But that animosity has dissipated. Elon Musk bought Twitter and not only reinstated Trump, but has endorsed him and pledged to donate millions to his campaign. Facebook lifted all restrictions once placed on Trump’s account. And the chorus of Silicon Valley VCs and founders who’ve endorsed Trump, from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz to David Sacks to Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire, have surely helped ease past feuds with the Valley from his mind.

Trump’s tech politics are almost entirely motivated by personal grievance. Now that said grievances have largely been ameliorated, and enough evidence can be amassed, to his personal satisfaction, that Silicon Valley loves him or whatever such thing he’d like to say in stump speeches, we can expect him to treat it like he does any other well-capitalized industry operated by the very wealthy: hands off, with favors to those in his good graces.

Some kind of Musk-Trump symbiosis feels particularly ripe, and particularly noxious, even if an actual cabinet position would likely never happen. The FTC and the DoJ would almost certainly be pulled back from their current spate of antitrust efforts, power would concentrate further among the Silicon Valley giants, and union drives at tech companies (and everywhere else) would be left high and dry under a Trump National Labor Relations Board. He’d do what he could to regulate crypto less, especially given that he now owns a crypto company, too.

Kamala Harris on crypto, gig work, and antitrust

Harris hasn’t publicly released many concrete proposals when it comes to tech policy, and Silicon Valley wasn’t really her focus as VP. We know that she’s enthusiastic about the CHIPs Act, a bipartisan law supported by the Biden administration that directs funding to domestic chip manufacturers, and that she’s comfortable with bromides about needing to lead on innovation. But it’s otherwise not entirely clear where she’d continue her current boss’s approach to the tech sector and where she’d diverge from it, so we’re left to largely look between the lines. Some of what we see there is a little disconcerting.

To start, Democratic donors from Silicon Valley and Wall Street are pressuring Harris to fire Biden’s tech monopoly-challenging FTC chief, Lina Khan, and Harris hasn’t really gone to bat for her. The Harris campaign has welcomed an Uber executive into a role as a top advisor. It ominously touted a so-called ‘crypto reset’, in an apparent bid to signal renewed Democratic openness to a part of the tech industry that has long complained about overregulation. And with regard to AI, her official platform vaguely states that “Harris will continue to support American leadership in semiconductors, clean energy, AI, and other cutting edge industries of the future.” Nothing much on actual AI governance or regulation.

None of this is great. Along with Harris’s pointed abandonment of a number of progressive commitments articulated in her 2020 presidential campaign—medicare for all, opposing fracking—the bitcoin gesture appeared to be part and parcel of an effort to broadcast that she is friendly to tech, and to business generally, and is not the far-left radical depicted in the attack line from the Trump camp. Fortunately, after a little blowback, Harris hasn’t really followed up on the crypto reset stuff, and when she released her official policy platform, it was nowhere to be found.

Worse is that Harris brought her brother-in-law, Tony West, into the inner circle as a key campaign advisor. West’s day job is serving as the chief legal council for Uber, where he makes up to $10 million a year crafting legal theory that allows the gig app giant to classify its drivers as contractors, not employees, so it can pay them what often amounts to less than minimum wage after expenses. Harris also brought on David Plouffe, a former Obama advisor who did time at Uber too, has worked for Mark Zuckerberg, and has a penchant for helping tech companies elude regulations, or bend rules to their will, even when it means breaking a law or two. These two additions to the Harris campaign staff should send up some red flags to anyone who thinks big tech should have less power over workers, not more.

Now, Harris has made a point of supporting unions; she gave an energized speech with Shawn Fain and the UAW, and she has officially pledged to sign the PRO Act, which aims to make organizing much easier, as well as to raise the national minimum wage. But even if she makes good on those promises, the question remains how she’ll handle the burgeoning number of independent contractors who her brother-in-law helped ensure have no worker protections.

The Biden administration passed a resolution making it harder for tech companies (and all companies) to classify their workers as independent contractors, rather than employees that receive benefits. Harris’s close and tech-connected advisors might be inclined to push her to let the issue drop. Her VP pick, too: Last year, as the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz vetoed a bill that would have guaranteed gig workers a minimum wage. Yet precarious, algorithmically organized work is on the rise; independent and gig workers may account for as much as a third of the workforce. It’s a crucial issue regarding tech and the future of work, and it’s an arena Silicon Valley is adamant about keeping unregulated.

The jury is still out on how Harris actually feels about Lina Khan and the FTC, but there are worrying signs here, too. Another one of her top advisors is Karen Dunn, a lawyer who helped Harris prepare for the debate with Trump, and who also happens to currently be *Google’s legal representation defending the company in the Biden-Harris administration’s antitrust lawsuit*. Dunn quite literally delivered the opening remarks defending Google on Monday, and then rushed out to help Harris with debate prep. This was called out by Republican representative Jim Jordan, of all people, in a perfect use case for everyone’s favorite Onion meme.

This matters more because there is a real drumbeat, from Silicon Valley bigwigs like Reid Hoffman, other tech insiders, and finance industry donors to push Lina Khan out. Same, reportedly, with Gary Gensler, the head of the Security and Exchange Commission—who has been aggressive in pursuing fraud charges in the crypto industry. And note that the megarich want these folks gone *because they are getting results.* Khan in particular has been one of the brightest lights in the perennially unpopular Biden administration. Poll after poll after poll reflect that Americans worry that big tech has too much power, and Khan has taken on Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. She is at the forefront of the push to break that power; to make tech to serve ordinary people again. Firing Khan would probably inspire a lot more progressive backlash than, say, abandoning Biden’s gig worker proposal, but the strength and number of ties Harris has to Silicon Valley should leave us prepared for anything.

Tech and the 47th president

This isn’t really meant to be a “voter guide” or anything. That’s not really necessary, I don’t think. If you care about tech policy with regard to worker or consumer rights, you couldn’t do much worse than Trump. Alternatively, if you are, say, a Silicon Valley millionaire hoping to avoid as much regulation and oversight as possible, and you are okay with and/or are excited by the vilifying of migrant workers and degrading of women’s rights, you’re already in the tank for the man.

No, this is more an effort to game out what these two plausible futures look like, so we can either prepare for a second round of chaos, deregulation, wanton crypto profiteering, and cringey photo ops of Elon Musk at the White House, or a Harris presidency that may continue Biden’s promising start in antitrust regulation or may drift back to Obama-style friendliness to Silicon Valley, and will either way probably need to be pushed hard to enact meaningful policies curbing big tech’s power.

Trump is going to Trump. Any effort to influence his camp’s tech policy would have to begin with asking him not to rip off his own supporters by charging them a hundred bucks for worthless jpegs. Not going to happen. Harris’s campaign is more fluid, and has thus far been somewhat responsive to progressive and voter demands—at least those not regarding Palestine—so it’s maybe worth making the case, right now, for more intervention in corporate tech, for good gig work and AI policy, for strong continued antitrust action. It is, for one thing, better “optics”. Last year, a Brookings Institution report observed Americans’ sinking confidence in the US tech sector and concluded that there is “a growing consensus among polling organizations that the public’s support for the technology industry is slipping badly.” Just a few months ago, a Pew survey found that a majority of Americans do not trust tech companies and want regulatory efforts to continue apace—or to be even more aggressive. The labor movement and the FTC have made small strides against giants like Amazon, Uber, and Microsoft; and it’s those entities that are more popular than they have been in decades, while big tech’s profile declines.

The Biden administration, for all its many faults, has made real progress in pushing back against the excesses of big tech. To abandon these efforts would be to regress, and leave millions of consumers and workers vulnerable. So I’ll leave this with a short note to the Harris campaign—if someone wants to forward this to the Kamala camp, that’d be great, thx.

Now is absolutely not the time to cozy up to big tech, to pander to the crypto vote, or to preference the opinions of Silicon Valley executives. On a purely political level, little of the above is a winning strategy. Big tech is unpopular, cheerleading crypto—just a year after the industry nearly collapsed from widespread fraud—is hardly a good way to try to bolster pro-business bona fides, and siding with the Valley over working people will put a stain on a campaign that will be hard to wipe away. There is a reason that hating on big tech is one of our few remaining legitimately bipartisan pastimes. It may be tempting to try to recreate the Obama era’s ‘big data Democrat/happy Silicon Valley’ symbiosis, but those days are gone, the notion that tech equals progress long ago proven illusory. Furthermore, the fallout of the era is quite palpable, and all of the above is more likely than not to alienate voters and end in failure. In 2024, standing up to Silicon Valley, not succumbing to it, is the pressing need—and the better politics.

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BONUS VIDEO: Friend of BITM Sergio Avedian stars in this great video documentary from More Perfect Union about how Uber and other gig work companies use algorithmic wage discrimination to pay drivers less—a finding based on the work of *another* friend of BITM Veena Dubal’s pioneering legal work. Kamala’s brother in law even makes an appearance. It’s a must-watch:

That’s it for this week—thanks again for reading, best to all, and remember to always take aim at the machinery hurtful to commonality.

1. Okay, one of two.