For Europe, the outcome of next week’s US election will have profound consequences. NATO funding is at stake, as is a potential peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Projections suggest a trade war with Donald Trump could hit GDP in the bloc’s biggest economy, Germany, by 1.5 percent. The future of big tech, by comparison, is a sideshow—but a fraught one. President Joe Biden’s administration ushered in a new era of confrontation with the likes of Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia, which all faced legal action during his time in office. A proposal to break-up Google is still pending.
Unlike many other places in the world where US tech reigns, when the European Union makes new rules, these companies pay attention. In the Biden era, the EU found an ally in its ambitions to reign in big tech, says Max von Thun, director of Europe and Transatlantic partnerships at the Open Markets Institute. “Under Trump or really even under [former President Barack] Obama, there was this feeling that if the EU went too far, there would be a backlash from the US,” von Thun explains, meaning regulators felt that ordering companies to break-up their business was off the table. “Whereas under Biden, because the US is pursuing those types of remedies, the EU thinks, well we can do that too.”
Many in Brussels would like that alignment to continue. Most Europeans defer to American search engines, scroll American social media feeds, and shop on American ecommerce sites. There’s longstanding concern that the dominance of the big five—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—is stifling European competition and shortchanging consumers. This is not only an issue for EU regulators. It’s also preoccupying the minds of ordinary Americans, according to Democratic pollster Lake Research Partners. A survey of 600 likely voters in seven crucial battleground states and Ohio found that 67 percent believe corporate power—and the lack of government pushback—to be one of the country’s biggest problems. With the new Digital Markets Act, Europe has made its intention to limit the tech giants’ reach clear . Enforcing those new rules, however, would be a lot easier with American buy-in.
Big tech politics in this election are messy. Silicon Valley titans are split between Democrats and Republicans. Throughout their campaigns, both Trump and Kamala Harris have been non-committal about how they would regulate the world’s biggest companies. Trump has gestured, vaguely, that “something” should be done about Google, to make the company “more fair”. Harris, meanwhile, has so far been mute on whether she agrees with Democratic megadonor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s characterisation of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust policy as a “war on American business”.
How much Harris would continue Biden’s relatively confrontational approach is unclear. Biden diverged from the policies of his own running mate, Obama, who hit back at European scrutiny of Google and Facebook by accusing the bloc of protectionism, saying European companies “can’t compete.” Harris’ own comments on antitrust have been sparse, although she has long expressed interest in data protection. “I think Facebook has experienced massive growth and has prioritized its growth over the best interest of its consumers—especially on the issue of privacy,” she said in a CNN interview back in 2019. When pushed on whether the company should be broken up, she responded: “Yes, I think we should seriously take a look at that.”
But big tech hawks in Brussels have been closely tracking Harris’ ties to Silicon Valley. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, who has been acting as a close adviser, is chief legal officer for Uber. The company announced in August that he would be taking a unpaid leave of absence to focus on the campaign. Google attorney Karen Dunn has also been linked to Harris, and prepped her for the ABC debate last month.
“To me, Harris is a bit of a risk of an Obama [repeat] when it comes to big tech,” says Umberto Gambini, who worked in the European Parliament for 15 years and still keeps a photo of the 2015 Financial Times front page, featuring Obama’s criticism of Europe’s tech policy, on his phone. That doesn’t mean he’d vote for Trump, stresses Gambini, now partner at consultancy Forward Global. But under Harris, he’d expect a return of an Obama-style appreciation of the Valley.
Hand wringing over Harris’s Silicon Valley ties has almost become “a meme”, says one think tank executive, who asks to remain anonymous. It is the contrarian point to make, he adds, that it is Trump’s running mate, JD Vance—not Harris—who has praised FTC chair and antitrust firebrand Lina Khan for “doing a pretty good job”.
Yet Vance also has ties to the tech industry—he spent two years working at Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who later supported Vance’s Senate campaign—and there is widespread suspicion of his motives. “They’ve been really using the language and narrative against big tech,” says Frederike Kaltheuner, senior EU and global governance lead at the AI Now Institute, of Vance’s allies. The Trump campaign has suggested curbing the tech giants as a way to punish them for alleged bias against conservatives. “When you have companies like Facebook and Google censoring American citizens, making it harder for Americans to speak in their own political process, that is a major problem,” Vance told CNBC in September, pointing to Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006 as an example. “I do think that there should be an antitrust solution to it.”
Historically, Trump has been no fan of Europe’s approach to big tech, referring to EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager in a 2019 Fox interview as “a woman in Europe…[who] hates the United States.” His problem was not that the tech giants were getting sued—“we should be suing Google and Facebook”—but that it was the EU doing it. “They make it very…almost impossible to do two-way business,” he said at the time.
Vestager will no longer be leading Europe’s antitrust strategy, once her replacement is confirmed in November. Yet she leaves a mascot of transatlantic tech collaboration behind in Washington. In the FTC chair’s office is a knitted toy elephant gifted to Khan by Vestager, who made a habit of handing them out. Vestager has long spoken of Khan as an ally. “There’s a lot of alignment in the way that we think,” she said of Khan and Jonathan Kanter, antitrust chief in the US Department of Justice, in 2021.
Amid mixed signals from the Trump and Harris campaigns, whether Khan is replaced after the election will be seen in Brussels as an indicator of the direction the new administration will take on big tech. It’s unclear if Khan—who has featured on the campaign trail with Democrats—would work for the Republicans, even as Vance praises her approach. Her team declined to comment on whether she would serve under a Trump presidency.
Whether she would be able to stay in her post under Harris is also unclear. Khan’s fate has split the Democrats. Progressives, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are calling for Khan to be kept on. “Lina is doing an exceptional job preventing large corporations from ripping-off consumers and exploiting workers,” Senator Bernie Sanders said in her defense. But donors have called for her head. “Lina Khan is…a person who is not helping America,” Linkedin co-founder Hoffman told CNN in July. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has since echoed those comments. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence,” he said, adding if he was Harris, he wouldn’t keep Khan on.
Among big tech’s adversaries in Brussels, there is a growing realization of how well the big tech cooperation of the last four years worked for them, just as it comes to an end. Of the post-Biden future, they can only hope, the knitted elephant remains in its office.
Source : Wired
