Scrabble tiles spelling out the word Facebook

If You Think Biden’s Administration Will Rein in Big Tech, Think Again

Biden’s transition team is packed with tech industry insiders. All those campaign donations from tech companies may turn out to have been a shrewd investment. The odds of a Biden administration taking on the power of the tech giants is only slightly better than those of a snowball staying cool in hell.

November 21, 2020 | Source: The Guardian | by John Naughton

The US president-elect is reported to have appointed former employees of Facebook and Amazon to his transition team.

Before the US presidential election I wondered aloud if Mark Zuckerberg had concluded that the re-election of Trump might be better for Facebook than a Biden victory. There were several reasons for thinking this. One was the strange way Zuckerberg appeared to be sucking up to Trump: at least one private dinner in the White House; the way he jumped on to Fox News when Twitter first placed a warning on a Trump tweet to say that Facebook would not be doing stuff like that; and the majority report of the House subcommittee on tech monopolies, in which it was clear that the Democrats had it in for the companies.

But the most significant piece of evidence for the belief that a Biden administration would finally tackle the tech giants, and Facebook in particular, came in the long interview Biden gave last January to the New York Times, in which he was highly critical of the company.