David Barrett did not start Expensify for political reasons, but a lot has changed in the last four years. On Oct 22, less than two weeks before the US election, Barrett sent a 1,300-word email to all of his company’s 10m customers, begging them to vote out Donald Trump.
“Anything less than a vote for [Joe] Biden is a vote against democracy,” Barrett wrote to a global audience, some of whom cancelled their accounts with the San Francisco tech company the next morning. “We are facing an unprecedented attack on the foundations of democracy itself.”
The email was extraordinary, but Barrett’s sentiments are not unusual ones in Silicon Valley. Donations to Biden’s presidential campaign at major tech companies outnumber those to Trump’s by 20 to one. Billionaires including Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, and Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, have given millions to groups supporting the former vice president.
Tech industry support for the Democrats is nothing new. Bill Clinton won the backing of a previously Republican-leaning Silicon Valley in 1992 with a promise to unleash the internet’s potential and invest in research. Barack Obama enthusiastically courted executives.
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But unlike those of his would-be predecessors, a Biden administration promises to be significantly harsher on Silicon Valley. The 77-year-old has criticised Facebook, promised to revoke key protections for tech giants, and leads a party that is enthusiastic about breaking up monopolies.
“There is going to be much greater scrutiny of the tech sector and tougher law enforcement,” says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
“They [Big Tech] have had decades of low taxes and minimal regulation. In a year, the situation could be radically different. The Democratic Party has changed in its relationship to the tech sector.”
Biden has rarely talked about technology throughout his campaign, unlike one-time challengers such as Elizabeth Warren, who made splitting up Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple key to her campaign for the Democratic nomination.
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But close followers of tech policy say this is more down to a desire to keep the campaign focused on vote winners such as coronavirus and racial justice than a sign that Silicon Valley should relax.
“The thing their team is focusing on is: ‘How do we rebalance the American economy to make it more fair?’ ” says a former Obama administration official who now works in the tech industry. “Antitrust is a huge part of that.”
Biden, campaigning as a centrist, has not been publicly enthusiastic in his support for radical competition enforcement against the likes of Google and Facebook, only saying that the government should be “worrying about the concentration of power”.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks about coronavirus and health care at The Queen theater, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020, in Wilmington, Del.
Credit: Andrew Harnik/AP
But key Biden economic advisers such as Heather Boushey have called for stronger anti-monopoly laws, and Rohit Chopra, a potential appointee to the trust-busting Federal Trade Commission, has demanded more active regulation.
West says a tough line on tech would be an offering to Left wing factions of the party. “They’re going to push Biden further to the Left on that issue. His impulses on technology are very centrist, but in order to maintain his coalition he has to keep the progressives on board. And the progressives are out for blood on technology.”
That could mean limits on acquisitions or even forced separations, as proposed by a Congress antitrust panel last month.
Tech bosses may not see this as a reason to oppose Biden. The Trump administration charged Google with monopoly abuse last month, and is gearing up to take on Facebook too. Whoever is in the White House, any monopoly challenge must win in the courts to be effective, and judges have been historically lenient on antitrust matters.
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But a Biden regime would also be likely to regulate areas of tech that are attracting growing scrutiny, such as privacy, artificial intelligence and how social media companies police material.
He has praised the European data protection rules that came into force two years ago, but which critics say have made life harder for smaller companies, and called for the repeal of Section 230, a 24-year-old law that Facebook, Twitter and Google rely on to avoid being treated as publishers.
Rob Atkinson, the head of Washington think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, led work on emerging technologies for the Biden campaign’s policy advisory body. He says rules governing AI will aim to prevent algorithms from reflecting racial or gender bias, an issue close to Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris.
“An overriding focus of a Biden administration will be racial justice. The advocacy groups out there are screaming that AI is biased against racial minorities. Some of the systems are and some aren’t, but I think you will see something about that,” he says.
Biden has also promised higher corporate taxes, and in particular to challenge profits being stashed overseas. William de Gale, a former BlackRock fund manager who now runs the UK-based BlueBox global technology fund, says this is likely to hit big tech companies in particular.
“If you got someone like Biden, who is prepared to co-operate internationally with other tax authorities, unlike Trump, then you could get a spine put back into those tax authorities,” he says.
Biden has been keen to paint himself as different to Obama, and tech policy was one of the matters where the two often differed. If Silicon Valley’s giants hope a president Biden means a return to the pre-2016 era, when they were lauded rather than feared, they are unlikely to get it.
“There are still a lot of older Obama folks in that environment,” says the former official. “But the country has changed fundamentally. The techlash is real.”
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