On Friday, the White House announced a potentially important, if modest, effort to further tamp down the power of the technology industry. This time the instrument is an executive order—the kind of wide-ranging declaration that often gets called “sweeping” or “major,” though its efficacy may take years to gauge—that covers everything from competition in the economy to drug prices to reforming a tech sector that is defined by a handful of seemingly unstoppable titans. Offering a mix of general recommendations, requests for action from other government agencies, and new administration policies, the Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy may be just what our overconsolidated economic system needs. But in tackling the power of a tech sector that has not only wrested control of the economy but remade it in its own data-hungry image, the Biden administration is still throwing pebbles at its enemy’s parapets. The tech industry has had 20 years to establish a stranglehold over our personal data, attention, and consumer choice. To tackle these problems, we need more, much more.
Despite promising to take on the power of Big Tech, President Joe Biden and his administration have so far taken a cautiously incrementalist approach. He’s appointed tough industry critics like Lina Khan to be commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, but he has yet to name a head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, a key role for any future enforcement action. In Congress, Democrats have introduced six smallish antitrust bills, but their path out of the House is murky, as ongoing disputes between Republicans and Democrats over how to fight this legislative battle mean that the final bills could look much different than they did in committee—if they make it to a floor vote at all. (It doesn’t help that some Silicon Valley–adjacent Democratic politicians, like Representative Ted Lieu and Representative Ro Khanna, have been less than supportive of the bills.)
As federal and congressional leadership lag, states have forged ahead, with dozens of attorneys general coming together in lawsuits like one, filed this week, accusing Google of anti-competitive practices. Other ongoing antitrust suits include one against Amazon over pricing issues; another lawsuit (this one with DOJ participation) against Google; and two others against Facebook that a judge recently threw out. In this proliferating legal war against Big Tech—premised on a lack of competition and companies’ abusing their monopoly status—any of these cases could yield billion-dollar fines for one of the tech giants. But fines are easily paid. Whether these suits can lead to meaningful reform, to breaking up companies and redirecting business practices away from the current dominant model of user surveillance and bulk data collection—that is far less clear. As with proposed legislation in the House, bipartisan legal efforts may be sundered on the altar of competing partisan priorities, with Republicans focusing on alleged censorship and Democrats more focused on economic competition and user rights.
With the stage set for legislative gridlock, drawn-out lawsuits, and bickering over the FTC’s legitimacy, a small opening has emerged for the Biden administration to take meaningful action on its own. And there are some measures in the executive order worth celebrating. One section aims to improve internet service by eliminating early termination fees and providing transparent pricing to help drive competition. Another proviso calls for gadget users—from farmers working on tractors to people tinkering with their own cell phones—to have what’s often referred to as “the right to repair,” a right that tech companies have suppressed by discouraging DIY or third-party work on broken items. (Forcing customers to take their doddering laptop to Apple’s Genius Bar helps the company maintain control over its products and ensures that repairs, and the money they generate, stay in-house.) Other relevant orders call for the restoration of net neutrality and applying more scrutiny to corporate mergers, which may prevent a tech giant from swallowing up the next WhatsApp or Slack, formerly insurgent chat/social media platforms that were absorbed by Facebook and Salesforce.
In the last year, tech companies have shifted their rhetoric, claiming that they are in favor of regulation—just on their terms. To that end, they’ve deployed armies of lobbyists to woo elected officials, making companies like Google and Facebook some of the most profligate spenders on K Street. With the potential for major legislative action still up in the air—a divided Senate doesn’t augur well, unless tech-critical Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley line up behind the Democratic legislative agenda, which seems unlikely—executive action may be the most promising way forward. Call it death by a thousand regulations. It’s also—as the executive order’s many prompts for action by the Federal Communications Commission, the FTC, and DOJ show—a plea for the government to do its damn job.
Even sympathetic observers may survey this latest initiative with some well-earned cynicism. Regulatory capture, in which regulatory agencies become beholden to the companies and industries they oversee, is a well-known feature of the land, and the families of leading politicians like Representative Nancy Pelosi periodically trade stocks based on what appears to be insider information. And as demonstrated by the measure to treat all internet traffic equally by restoring net neutrality (something that the Trump administration did away with), the Biden administration is still playing catchup, fighting many of yesterday’s battles. For instance, the order “calls on the leading antitrust agencies, [the DOJ and FTC], to enforce the antitrust laws vigorously and recognizes that the law allows them to challenge prior bad mergers that past Administrations did not previously challenge.”
While divesting WhatsApp and Instagram from Facebook are worthwhile efforts, there’s also a sense that would-be tech reformers are struggling to deal with the mistakes and oversights of a previous generation of politicians (i.e., pushing for the enforcement of existing laws is yet another call for the government to do its job). Even the order’s directive that the FTC “establish rules on surveillance and the accumulation of data” seems incredibly belated. We are 20-odd years into a surveillance economy, in which consumers have become the main source to be mined for value. The resulting inequities are vast, as the tech giants have had decades to strengthen their positions. It will take far more than an executive order to undo all this, much less to ensure a more equitable future. The question is: Does the Biden administration understand this grim state of play, or is this the best we’re going to get?
