HOW DOES TRUMP REALLY FEEL ABOUT BIG TECH / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

How does Trump really feel about Big Tech?

The question of whether the president is a populist or a libertarian when it comes to Silicon Valley remains unclear

Rana Foroohar

© Matt Kenyon

The words “Trump” and “tech” conjure up Elon Musk and his chainsaw, along with the image of Silicon Valley’s titans in the front row of the president’s inauguration. 

But visuals aside, the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are pushing meaningful actions against Big Tech. 

Donald Trump himself is expected to sign bipartisan legislation cracking down on deep fakes while the White House continues to pursue tech decoupling with China. 

So, is Trump a pro-tech libertarian? 

Or an anti-Big Tech populist?

As with most things, it depends on the president’s personal interests at any given moment. 

That was in evidence last week, when Amazon’s Haul division (which sells ultra-low-cost goods directly shipped from Chinese warehouses) considered posting numbers showing the effects of tariffs on consumer prices. 

Trump’s press secretary quickly declared this a “hostile and political” act.

My first thought was, “what a great use of reams of data collected by Big Tech companies”. 

I love the idea of Amazon creating what would amount to a supply chain nutritional label, which could conceivably illuminate not only the inflationary impact of tariffs, but how much of the cost increase large companies are prepared to take (the likely answer: not much).

Amazon had a different idea, and quickly killed the topic. 

Founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos spoke to the president by phone. 

“Jeff Bezos was very nice,” said Trump. 

“He was terrific. 

He solved the problem very quickly.”

The episode illuminates something larger, which is the conflicting signals from Trump’s administration on technology and regulation. 

It’s yet another area of policy in which we simply are not getting clarity from the White House.

Vice-president JD Vance, for example, has a long association with tech billionaire Peter Thiel but is also a fan of former FTC chair Lina Khan and her anti-monopoly crusade.

Remedies in Google’s monopoly case are likely to come out in the next couple of weeks, and the head of the DoJ’s antitrust division, Gail Slater, has advocated tough solutions, calling for the search giant to sever its default search engine deal with Apple, sell off its Chrome browser and license its search data to competitors.

While Slater is no Khan, her pro-market stance means that she doesn’t buy into Silicon Valley’s ridiculous national champion argument that bigger is better in the fight for tech supremacy with China. 

“We think that we should have more confidence in our system and not think that in order to compete with China, we have to become more like China,” she said in a recent interview with conservative pundit Sohrab Ahmari.

Slater has argued, as many liberals do, for regulatory action to make sure innovation isn’t squashed by Big Tech giants trying to kill or acquire start-ups that threaten their core business model. 

She cites the Reagan era break-up of AT&T, which sped up cellular innovation, as a North Star case.

Protecting the innovators who may create the next Google or Meta means understanding how tech giants build impenetrable moats around their services. 

This view is driving a new FTC suit against Uber, in which the regulator accuses the rideshare giant of making it difficult for users to cancel its subscription service (charges Uber denies). 

Regulatory pushback of this kind, which challenges information asymmetry and the opacity of Big Tech’s business model, overlaps with the approach of Joe Biden’s administration. 

And yet, Trump is not Biden. 

The previous government reintroduced the idea of power in the political economy, and used it to measure the influence of Big Tech. 

The idea that you had to look behind the consumer welfare model to regulate the digital economy (which is primarily an information barter economy) was brave, novel and correct.

The 47th president, however, is picking up on power as a regulatory theme in ways that are capricious at best.

Consider, for instance, how Trump has behaved around the FTC’s “buy or bury” antitrust case against Meta. 

As The Wall Street Journal reported, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg lobbied Trump personally and extensively, in the hopes that he would force the FTC to accept the company’s $450mn offer to settle, which was a fraction of the $30bn the agency had asked for.

Zuckerberg was apparently quite confident that Trump would support him. 

He didn’t, but that may simply mean that the last people in his office were from the FTC and not Meta. 

Does anyone doubt that Trump could yet strike a deal with Zuckerberg or Google to soften antitrust action in exchange for some personal or political favour?

The one area Trump seems unlikely to waver on is tech decoupling with China. 

Witness the new export ban on Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips. 

And yet, his blanket tariff approach caused the EU to threaten massive digital taxes on Silicon Valley companies. 

The fact that the US is fighting Europe at the same time as China will make it less likely that the rest of the world will want to be in America’s technology orbit. 

What’s more, tariffs are likely to hurt small companies more than larger ones, meaning that the big may get bigger.

As long as they appear to be on Trump’s side, I doubt he will care.