President Joe Biden’s administration is ramping up its regulation behavior, particularly attempts to target so-called Big Tech as the Nov. 5 election draws near and with previous President Donald Trump on the verge of becoming the Republican nomination.
The Biden presidency began a struggle in its regulation federal authorities when Democrats held complete control of the government from 2021 to 2023 and antitrust laws were being blocked by Congress. In addition, Biden appointed law professor Lina Khan to guide the Federal Trade Commission and an intellectual ally, Jonathan Kanter, to guide the Department of Justice Antitrust Division in the early stages of his presidency.
The most recent example of the White House’s “whole of state” initiative to stifle investigations into Microsoft’s expense in OpenAI and Nvidia, a leader in artificial intelligence, and the DOJ’s offer to divide up investigations into the software industry, is the most recent instance of the “whole of authorities” initiative. Khan recently stated to a Harvard Law School visitors that the FTC wants to ensure that there is still room for competition and disruption because” the AI space is so rapidly moving” rather than that some of the already strong companies co-opt them to increase their dominance at this point.
But reviewers have their questions. Americans for Tax Reform’s director of competition and governmental policy, Tom Hebert, stated to the Washington Examiner,” Competitive attacks on AI are an illegal use of government power and may place us in the position of defeat for communist China in the world Artificial race.”
He went on to note the irony in the Biden administration’s scrutiny of AI development:” Joe Biden ran for president promising to ‘ end cancer as we know it.’ Biden’s antitrust lawsuit against AI could endanger a cancer-detecting and treatment technology and eventually lead to the development of a cure.
Additionally, Biden’s Department of Justice is opposed to well-established business practices in the tech industry. A federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, recently ordered a DOJ case against Google to be a bench, instead of a jury, trial. The case, which was originally filed in January 2023, claims that Google monopolized several open web display advertising markets involving the ad tech stack. The stack consists of technological tools that allow website publishers to sell advertising space to potential online buyers. This September, the case will be heard in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Cases brought under the Biden administration against Amazon, Meta, and Apple are ongoing.
The White House’s regulatory zeal has also not been ignored by the telecom sector. In his” Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy” from July 2021, Biden called for the reinstatement of net neutrality laws. The Federal Communications Commission acted on April 25th, 2014, by reversing open-internet regulations and redesigning broadband as a Title II telecom service. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will randomly choose to hear a combination of more than 50 challenges filed across seven circuits, will hear the regulations first.
Net neutrality is a rare partisan split in a larger backlash against large corporations and the tech industry that has defied falling along party lines because similar rules were repealed under the Trump administration.
Repeal during Trump’s administration attracted unheard public interest in a telecom-related issue, and opponents warned that the rollback would mark the “end of the internet as we know it” situation. However, after the repeal, no widespread blocking of sites or other service disruptions occurred. The FCC allegedly acted beyond its authority, according to industry groups, and the change will deter private investment in broadband infrastructure. Jessica Rosenworcel, the chairwoman of the FCC, stated to reporters that she has “full confidence that what we have proposed is complies with outstanding opinions in the D. C. Circuit and the Supreme Court.”
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The DOJ sued Live Nation Entertainment’s Ticketmaster last month, giving evidence that Biden agency leaders are aiming to increase regulatory actions beyond the tech space. The complaint accuses the business of being a monopolist and of other “unlawful conduct that thwarts competition in markets across the live entertainment industry.” However, in response to issues with the website’s meltdown involving Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour ticket sales, critics claim that the case is a politically motivated attempt to appeal to younger voters.
It remains to be seen how much of an increased vigor of antitrust enforcement and these crackdowns on technology industries will affect the results of the presidential election. According to a poll conducted in April 2024 by the left-leaning group Chamber of Progress, 77 % of voters in battleground states preferred the next president to “focus on expanding technology jobs and services rather than regulating Amazon, Google, and Apple”
