Tech policy in the Biden-Harris Era
How long will Americans continue to put tech policy news on the back-burner?
Most economists agree that a more productive workforce leads to a healthier long-term national economy. For more than two-hundred years in the United States, technology innovation has not only allowed businesses of all sizes to expand the scale at which they can operate, but has emerged at the forefront of economic growth in the United States. As long as technological advances help to fuel the economy, industry regulations and policy will continue to sit on the back-burner. Technology is the driver of American productivity. Technology policy — or lack thereof — has lasting and serious effects on United States citizens.
When it comes to the technology industry, the Trump administration has generally erred on the side of fewer regulations. Though the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Department of Justice (DOJ) regulate internet communication, protect internet consumers, and enforce laws, any administration plays a substantial role in how agency appointees make tech-regulation decisions. Over the last four years, President Trump has committed to ensuring rural broadband access in conservative areas and not uniformly across all rural areas, called to weaken Section 230, launched a “fake news” campaign against social media and news-media outlets, and pushed the FCC to repeal the law that prevented broadband providers from blocking or slowing down access to websites, effectively repealing net neutrality.
Corruption from the Trump Administration aside, recently, Democrats and Republicans have grown frustrated with the lack of regulation on big tech. Just last month, the DOJ filed a lawsuit suit against Google for maintaining unlawful monopolies in several types of search services. While Joe Biden’s campaign has declined to comment on the issue, antitrust experts insist that, once sworn in as president, Biden will not push for the case against Google to be dropped. In fact, many are predicting that the Biden Administration might amend the complaint to add additional claims. Now that we await Biden to take over the White House in early 2021, let’s dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of his stance on some of the latest tech-policy issues driving the tech industry in the United States.
Recently, both President-elect Biden and President Trump called to revoke Section 230 CDA; however, the two hold the same position for opposite reasons. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act states that no provider of an interactive computer service should be treated as the publisher of any information posted or written by a third party user. Trump’s team insisted that social media platforms had been too punitive in cracking down on messages from him and his allies while Biden does not believe that Section 230 holds social media companies accountable enough for the spread of misleading posts by politicians. Since its inception in 1996, tech companies have argued that the law allows the internet to thrive. However, Biden and his team still call upon social media platforms, namely, Facebook, to use platforms to “improve American Democracy.” In the Biden presidential campaign’s open letter to Facebook, Biden argues that social media companies should be liable for perpetuating false information to the masses. Currently, Section 230 of the CDA prevents “internet companies,” like Facebook, from being sued for spreading false information. Biden also accused the social media platform of allowing President Trump and his allies to use Facebook to spread fear and misleading information about voting and ballot boxes. In a heated follow-up to his first letter to Facebook, Biden referred to Facebook as “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process.” Biden insists that Facebook failed to curb misinformation about the election and perpetuated false information even after making a public commitment to stop the spread of false information after the 2016 election.
The Biden campaign promised to extend broadband access to all Americans. At the top of Biden’s broadband priority list is to increase the number of broadband providers and to crack down on companies that violate net neutrality principles. Biden’s campaign website declares a 20-billion dollar investment into broadband infrastructure, also ensuring that the work of installing broadband creates high-paying jobs with benefits. Furthermore, the President-elect — in tandem with the Department of Agriculture — wants to increase Community Connect broadband grants threefold, for a total of 1.8 billion dollars. Biden also promises to work with the FCC to reform its Lifeline program by increasing the number of providers who can participate in providing broadband service to rural communities. To support those who might not be digitally fluent, Biden pushed for the Digital Equity Act, a proposition for more than a billion dollars in federal grant funding over the next five years targeted at supporting digital inclusion and literacy programs throughout the United States, in 2019. Since rural Americans are ten times less likely to have access to high-speed internet than urban Americans, high-speed broadband is essential in the 21st century economy but even more so in the age of COVID-19.
A Federal Communications Commission under Joe Biden would restore net neutrality rules similar to those initiated by President Obama in 2015. Not only is the President-elect interested in taking action against companies blocking rural municipalities from building publicly-owned broadband networks, but the Democratic Party in Congress is working to increase federal support for broadband across the country. Furthermore, President-elect Biden has pushed to classify broadband as Title II under Section 224 (Pole Attachment Act) of the Communications Act. Title II protects competitive broadband service providers’ ability to attach their infrastructure to poles, giving the FCC more regulatory authority over broadband service providers. The 2015 FCC order, overturned by Republicans in 2018, also laid out net neutrality rules that prohibited broadband service providers from blocking or prioritizing certain internet traffic for payment. Though President-elect Biden hasn’t offered a realistic timeline for any of these actions to be completed, it is clear that equal access to uninterrupted service is a high priority for president-elect Biden’s team and that the American people will not need to be concerned that their access to broadband will depend on the voting leanings of their neighborhoods.
Joe Biden promises federal privacy legislation that is similar to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At its core, GDPR is a new set of rules designed to give European Union citizens more control over their personal information. Pre-existing legislation in the United States has only classified properties like name, address, and photos as personal information. Under GDPR, personal data included IP addresses, genetic data, and biometric data, all of which could be decrypted to identify a particular individual. Not only do these regulations apply to European Union organizations, but they also apply to businesses and organizations that offer services to individuals and businesses in the European Union. One of the GDPR’s biggest accomplishments was the provision that states that consumers have a right to know when their data has been compromised. GDPR generally places responsibility on businesses to keep logs on how user data is managed. While Joe Biden hasn’t proposed a new solution to the revocation of Section 230 of the CDA, he wants the American people to believe that he will lay a thicker foundation for tech policy, similar to Europe’s GDPR, within the next few years.
Because so few of us are aware of which technology policies affect our day-to-day lives, many of us put tech policy on the shelf in favor of more tangible issues.The lack of technology policy in the United States is, in part, why the tech industry has been able create niche monopolies across a wide range of industries within the last couple of decades. Technology policy poses a new quandary: to deregulate for the sake of economic growth or to regulate on behalf of the defenseless, individual user.
From November 2016 to October of 2020, tech industry regulations have remained fairly lax. About a month ago, the Trump administration filed an antitrust lawsuit, suggesting that Democrats and Republicans alike are in favor of more heavy industry regulation. While a Biden presidency will not result in fewer industry regulations, he has at least made clear that we can expect big changes in how people receive their information online and access the internet. While both President Trump and President-elect Biden agree that rural Americans deserve access to broadband, President Trump favored rural, Trump-supporting communities as broadband grant recipients. If big tech regulations and access to high-speed internet remain unattended, users might be compelled to take matters into their own hands, demanding that the federal government take more action since passing internet legislation like Section 230 more than 25 years ago. If Joe Biden does keep his promises while in office, Americans can expect privacy laws that favor the consumer and impose steep corporate penalties for noncompliance, an increase in both funding and the number of providers who can participate in providing broadband service to rural communities, and a crack down on companies that violate net neutrality principles.
