The Contradiction in Biden's Tech And Trade Policies

President Joe Biden has earned a domestic reputation as a staunch critic of Silicon Valley. His Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice are bringing high-profile antitrust cases against Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. In his State of the Union address, he called for stronger countermeasures against the social media industry’s data-gathering practices on children and teenagers in particular. And Congress is taking a strident stance against TikTok in particular, as part of a chillier turn in relations with China.

It may be surprising, then, for some Americans to learn just how much the Biden administration is doing Big Tech’s bidding beyond our shores.

While some agencies amp up their regulation of Silicon Valley under President Biden’s orders, serving the tech titans has been a core priority for Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. After over a year of stonewalling, Raimondo finally released an initial tranche of her professional calendars in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. The calendars reveal that in just her first year on the job, Raimondo took twice as many meetings with Big Tech lobbyists, CEOs, and executives as Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross did in four years on the job.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, in particular, racked up plenty of face time with the Secretary, enjoying seven one-on-one meetings with Raimondo over 11 months. The calendars show no equivalent input from prominent groups pushing for stronger regulation of Big Tech, such as Accountable Tech, Public Citizen, the Open Markets Institute, or the American Economic Liberties Project.

In just her first year on the job, Raimondo took twice as many meetings with Big Tech lobbyists, CEOs, and executives as Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross did in four years on the job.

Part of this tech overrepresentation is attributable to the semiconductor shortage during Biden’s first few years in office. But Raimondo is also Biden’s key proxy in negotiations with European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, the most powerful woman in the European Union when it comes to regulating online business models and breaking up Big Tech’s power. Seemingly every time Raimondo visited Europe or participated in global trade talks, her calendars show designated pull-aside conversations or long one-on-ones with Vestager.

The two are not trading notes on how best to restructure online markets or rein in the giants. Instead, Raimondo has worked doggedly to prevent the European Union, some of our closest allies, from taking actions completely in line with the Biden administration’s domestic philosophy on tech. When Raimondo delivered a speech warning Europe against adopting data policies that are in line with Biden’s own stated preferences, Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed Raimondo was “lobbying on behalf of Big Tech.” Among other changes, the EU was pushing for new regulations on online platforms that act as a “gatekeeper” for other firms, such as retailers who need to list on Amazon to access customers. These proposals were completely in line with Biden’s own approach to antitrust action against tech giants: if one of your biggest competitors also controls the portal through which you access clients, the competitors can (and do) rig the marketplace in unfair ways. But Raimondo claimed the U.S. had “serious concerns that these proposals will disproportionately impact U.S.-based tech firms” — which, indeed, was kind of the point.

This indicates a fundamental tension between Biden’s pro-regulation views on the tech industry domestically and his broader trade policy. He’s won praise for prioritizing American jobs over corporate cost-cutting, a shift largely attributable to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. (Tai and Raimondo famously butt heads within the administration.) But this does not mean he doesn’t view American business giants as tools for exerting power abroad, even as he criticizes them at home. On the world stage, Big Tech becomes a constituency to placate. Their business models may make life worse for everyone on Earth, but they make life worse in an American way, dammit.

If Raimondo’s activities are motivated by some sort of national pride in American business, it is fundamentally not reciprocated. Apple, with which Raimondo had so many meetings, famously shifted its headquarters to Ireland to dodge U.S. taxes in the early 2010s. When it got caught, Cook prickled at the thought that anyone would question him, telling Congress “We don’t stash money on some Caribbean island” — because it instead moved its money to the island of Jersey, which is an English Channel island.

Vestager, notably, declared Apple’s Irish tax shenanigans illegal in 2016, prompting a €13 billion fine plus interest. It was a strong example of the benefits of global tax harmonization, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has pursued.

But more importantly, Big Tech has caused global incidents far afield of pure business worries. In 2022, Amnesty Internationalaccused Facebook’s “dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit” of substantially contributing to the Myanmar military’s atrocities against the Rohingya people. Anti-Rohingya propaganda allegedly incited murders, rapes, and the largest forced human migration in recent human history.

If Biden believes in reclaiming American sovereignty, and proving that liberal democracy is superior to authoritarianism, he must assert that sovereignty over the exploitations of our own tech firms.

There’s also the atrocious working conditions for foreign content moderators. Facebook, YouTube (which is owned by Alphabet), and other social media firms outsource much of their content moderation to workers in the Philippines and other countries. Imagine earning subsistence wages by spending every day staring at images and videos of murders, sexual violence, hate crimes, and more. Unsurprisingly, Facebook content moderation workers in the U.S. and abroad report severe mental health problems. It’s just a built-in part of their job.

This is far from the most important implication of these horrific incidents, but in purely cynical realpolitik terms, it does pose a risk to U.S. credibility if we continue to defend the firms which propagate these harms. (Indeed, these harms are inevitable to the mass social media business model.) Instead, this all should indicate a more honest way for Biden administration officials, including Raimondo, to think about Big Tech and multinational corporate conglomerates more broadly.

These are not loyal nodes of U.S. power. They have no interest in spreading the best aspects of American values — democracy, diplomacy, fairness, or justice. They are only interested in their own bottom lines. While Congress and the White House work to rein in abuses by Big Tech domestically, those same companies are seeking to influence global trade agreements that would preempt reforms within the U.S. and in other countries. If they can get the U.S. government to carry water for their economic exploitation and, indeed, the crimes against humanity facilitated by their business models, they will. That has every downside for the United States, and every upside for these firms. Just because they were created in the United States does not mean they owe our country any loyalty, or share what Biden wishes the world to see as American values.

None of this should be novel or startling to Biden, Raimondo, or any government officials. All of it is the logical extension of flaws in Big Tech which they all already recognize. If Biden believes in reclaiming American sovereignty, and proving that liberal democracy is superior to authoritarianism, he must assert that sovereignty over the exploitations of our own tech firms.

Raimondo serves at Biden’s pleasure, and her actions should be taken as extensions of his own views. To be fair, if she did want to stand up to Big Tech, she’d have her institutional work cut out for her: the Commerce Department has long had one of the fastest-swinging revolving doors out to Silicon Valley, and its institutional structure takes as a tacit assumption that what’s good for American business is good for America.

But to be fairer, Raimondo’s own history as governor of Rhode Island was nothing but a string of handouts to big business, including tech. This is why Raimondo was hired. If he’s serious about his trade shifts and tech policies, it’s past time for Biden to sit down and really think through the contradictions in both.