It Won’t Be A Lovefest For Democrats And Silicon Valley in 2020

When Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) announced her candidacy for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination, she did something that would have been unheard of in previous election cycles: She explicitly criticized Silicon Valley’s big technology companies.

“For too long the big tech companies have been telling you, ‘Don’t worry! We’ve got your back!’ while your identities are being stolen and your data is mined,” Klobuchar said.

She isn’t the only Democrat running for president with a critique of Big Tech. In fact, every major 2020 Democratic presidential candidate has issued some form of statement critical of the industry or introduced legislation that would crack down on its most abusive practices.

That’s a huge shift for a party whose leaders have spent the last 30 years basking in the glow of the valley’s mythology of innovation and entrepreneurship, courting tech titans for their support and campaign contributions. It’s a marriage that reached its peak during the presidency of Barack Obama.

Obama was the first president who really got Silicon Valley ― and Silicon Valley got him. He brought tech insiders to Washington to bring their new ideas into government and streamline inefficient and outdated government technology infrastructure. And political hands went through the revolving door to work for those same tech companies.

Hillary Clinton, Obama’s first secretary of state and the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, made technology and the internet a central part of her foreign policy, advocating that tech adoption would advance democracy. Her presidential campaign’s tech policy was a “love letter to Silicon Valley,” according to Recode.

“Now, that’s over,” said Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank that has called for the government to break up Google, Facebook and Amazon. “Nobody thinks Big Tech is generally good ― or everybody has to at least acknowledge that they’re a problem. Nobody can say we need more Google in government.”

The Democratic Party’s diversion from Silicon Valley veneration to pointed criticism has coincided with a so-called “Techlash” ― the public backlash against tech industry abuses of user privacy, consumer protection and, most importantly, their market position.

Congress has spotlighted these abuses in a series of hearings over the past two years. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other top executives faced questions from lawmakers about a range of issues, from foreign countries using their platforms to manipulate U.S. political sentiment to the failure to protect user privacy to whether or not the companies constituted monopolies.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one leading Democratic presidential candidate, was out ahead of the pack in 2016 with a stinging critique of Big Tech.

She criticized Google, Apple and Amazon for using their platforms as “a tool to snuff out competition” and compared the tech giants to “too big to fail” financial institutions at an event at the New America Foundation, the Google-funded think tank whose then-chairman was ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The speech launched a row where Google complained to the think tank about the speech and eventually led to the expulsion of antitrust scholars there who would go on to found the Open Markets Institute.

Warren’s call for greater antitrust scrutiny of giant tech companies helped inform the Democratic Party’s adoption of anti-monopoly policies in its 2018 campaign platform. And many of her fellow candidates have since echoed her concerns.

Klobuchar has led on these anti-monopoly issues in the Senate from her perch as the ranking member on the antitrust subcommittee. She introduced legislation in 2017 that would ban companies with market capitalization above $100 billion from making any new acquisitions. While not specifically targeting Silicon Valley, the market cap limit in her bill would include the Big Four tech giants ― Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.