Pemo TheodoreAs the election dust settles, it seems safe to assume that Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States. And while control of the Senate likely won’t be decided until the outcome of two runoffs elections in early January, odds are that the Republicans maintain their majority, leaving us with a divided Congress.
For Silicon Valley, that’s both good news and bad. It’s good because a fully Democratic Congress would have seriously debated, and maybe passed, a slew of measures designed to rein in the technology industry, ranging from antitrust to privacy to worker classification. Now, the tech giants can probably avoid that bloodbath. But it’s also bad because many big ideas in tech can’t move forward without a regulatory framework, and the odds of the next Congress agreeing on anything significant are exceptionally low. That means that tech’s D.C. agenda should focus heavily on what can both be done—and stopped—within the Biden administration.
The removal of Donald Trump from the White House offers two key benefits to the entire tech industry: eliminating much of the volatility, uncertainty, and chaos that defined Washington and gripped the entire nation throughout Trump’s tenure; and reversing Trump’s staunch stance against immigration. The new administration will also have influence over other major areas of interest, like antitrust legislation and regulation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which currently immunizes websites from being sued for anything their users say. But while all eyes will be on the Biden administration’s approach to reining in Big Tech, there are a host of more subtle ways that Biden can influence the tech industry in the years to come.
- TELEHEALTH
- AUTONOMOUS TECH REGULATION
- GIG ECONOMY
- CRYPTOCURRENCY Read more via FastCompany
