What Donald Trump’s Win Will Mean for Big Tech
The most raucous cheers of the night were prompted by Trump’s promise to fire Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory agency that has brought a volley of lawsuits against crypto businesses under the Biden administration.
Separately, Trump has promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of darknet marketplace Silk Road, who is currently serving life in prison. Silk Road, through which people bought and sold drugs and other contraband, was among the first online services to accept bitcoin as payment. The severity of Ulbricht’s sentence is widely considered to be disproportionate by bitcoiners, who have long called for his release.
Antitrust
An early indicator of the relationship the Trump administration intends to have with Big Tech will be the fate of the Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.
Khan, the youngest ever FTC chair at 35, became a flashpoint in the election campaign. Among Democrat donors, her approach to antitrust enforcement and corporate power was deeply controversial. Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft all faced legal challenges under her tenure, although some were more successful than others.
“Lina Khan is … a person who is not helping America,” LinkedIn cofounder and Democrat donor Hoffman told CNN in July. Trump donor Elon Musk also expressed his dislike. “She will be fired soon,” he said of Khan last week.
Dan Ives, an analyst at financial services firm Wedbush, described Khan as a “nightmare for the tech sector,” adding there was a belief among analysts that her departure would act as a catalyst for more Big Tech deals. “The Musk influence for Trump could also catalyze and accelerate a potential Khan exit,” he said.
Trump has suggested, vaguely, that “something” should be done about Google, to make the company “more fair.” Vance has been more explicit, praising Khan for “doing a pretty good job.”
Vance appears to see break-ups as a solution for what he claims is Big Tech’s censorship of 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,” the vice president-elect said in September, giving Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006 as an example. “I do think that there should be an antitrust solution to it.”
A new Trump administration is unlikely to abandon antitrust cases against Big Tech, said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a left-leaning technology trade group, in a memo on Wednesday, noting several of these began under his first term. “But he will likely try to use these suits as leverage over the companies to get favorable treatment on speech and content concerns.”
Whether Khan would serve under Trump is unclear. Her team declined to comment on Wednesday. Bill Kovacic, a former FTC chair, said the chances of that happening beyond a few weeks were “close to zero.”
Joel Khalili, Morgan Meaker, and Zeyi Yang contributed reporting.
