Nelson de Sá: The antitrust winter is not over in Joe Biden’s USA

Little was noticed, but this week the White House left the White House the biggest defender of antitrust actions against American Big Techs, including the division into pieces of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Alphabet (Google, YouTube).

Taiwanese-American Timothy Shiou-Ming Wu, who is now returning to teach law at Columbia University in New York, declared himself “disappointed” when he left, having failed to pass any law relating to the technology sector.

He had arrived in Washington after proclaiming, in the final stretch of the 2020 Democratic campaign, that “the antitrust winter is over”. He was called upon to reverse the actions of previous Democratic presidents who had encouraged monopolies.

Technology platforms then carried the mark of having helped elect Republican Donald Trump four years earlier.

Wu was welcomed as their adversary when he took office 22 months ago, and five months ago it was announced that he would step down as technology adviser to Joe Biden.

Its defeat came during the first half of this year, when the “fierce lobby” of Meta and Alphabet, among other Silicon Valley giants, threw the antitrust bills into limbo.

Companies turned to the conflict in Ukraine to do so—when they “took sides” in the narrative wars from the beginning. In April, a petition of former defense secretaries, former CIA directors and others explicitly demanded:

“This is a pivotal moment in history. There is a battle brewing between authoritarianism and democracy. America’s platforms have given the world a chance to see the real story. [Os congressistas] must not inadvertently impair the capability of US platforms. The US will need to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure that the security of its citizens and the narrative of events continue to be shaped by facts, not foreign adversaries.”

This so-called Cold War card had already been used by the lobby for months, but with China as its target. It was argued then that the eventual reduction in the power of the American giants would favor Tencent or Huawei, from China.

Also then appeared a petition, with some of the same names, claiming that congressional antitrust measures would better position Chinese women to assume global prominence.

Anyway, Tim Wu lost again. It was he who coined the expression “net neutrality” two decades ago, used in a previous battle against access providers. As now, efforts in Congress failed.

BIDEN VS. MUSK

With Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and others now in line, enemies of the free world are still being sought in Silicon Valley, California. After losing the initial momentum to fight other Big Techs, Biden started to turn against Elon Musk and Tesla.

In his last State of the Union Address, when talking about investments in electric cars, he highlighted Ford and General Motors, not Tesla, the largest electric car maker in the world.

He even convened a meeting to discuss subsidies, at the White House, with them and even Stellantis, formerly Chrysler, but not Tesla. Musk, who was pro-Democrat and would have voted for Biden in 2020, is now a Republican – and he bought Twitter, where he defends himself.