Tech companies, who have become something of a bipartisan punching bag in recent years, are hoping a possible Harris administration might be a reset.
Agencies, lawmakers and regulators have become increasingly antagonistic toward their interests on everything from privacy to AI to antitrust and competition issues. Kamala Harris’ record — and her ties to Silicon Valley — has left room for some wishcasting for a new regime.
“I think as a senator, she was seen as having an open door and keeping an open mind,” said Adam Kovacevich, the CEO and founder of the Chamber of Progress, a progressive technology industry group. “That’s huge.”
“The biggest thing I see is she has not made attacks on business a core part of her identity,” Kovacevich said. “When she has talked about tech, it has largely been around consumer protection, fraud, scams and fairness.”
Harris has revealed little about what kind of policy agenda she wants to pursue on tech. However, an examination of her record and interviews with former staff who worked with her when she was California attorney general, in the Senate or during her time as vice president hint at how she might govern as president on the most pressing technology policy issues.
In the absence of detailed policy plans, close watchers have been reading the tea leaves of her team of advisers for signals on where she’ll fall on tech regulation. That includes her brother-in-law, Tony West, an executive at Uber who led the fight to classify drivers as independent contractors, not employees.
Another adviser with close Silicon Valley ties: Karen Dunn — who led Google’s defense in the Department of Justice’s sweeping anti-monopoly case last month — spearheaded Harris’ debate prep. The Google adviser by day, Harris adviser by night prompted some Republicans on the Hill to call it a “conflict of interest.”
Her past paints a picture of something that might be a pivot from the aggressive regulatory scrutiny under Joe Biden. Coming into office, Biden was not particularly tech savvy. Still, he filled his administration with a younger set of progressive regulators eager to challenge the concentrated power that Big Tech companies amassed — a “hipster” antitrust movement in the view of its detractors. Under a Harris administration, tech interests expect to at least get a sympathetic hearing from a familiar face who understands the issue.
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In 2017, tech companies were quietly waging a fierce lobbying campaign against a rare moment of bipartisan unity.
Congress was quickly coalescing around a bill that would strip away a key legal protection that platforms have enjoyed since 1996 on one particularly thorny issue: sex trafficking.
Loath to come out against a bill cracking down on internet prostitution and yet seeking to defend their long-standing immunity for hosting certain web content, Washington trade associations tried to kill the bill or at the very least protect themselves from additional liability.
Harris, then a freshman senator from tech-heavy California, was in the thick of finding a compromise. She helped craft legislative language and got internet companies to drop their opposition and endorse the bill, according to a person familiar with the negotiations and contemporaneous reporting from Axios and the AP. It passed the Senate 97-2 and was signed into law by then-President Donald Trump.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who represents a district that encompasses part of Silicon Valley, said about Harris: “She’s younger, she has more of a base in science and technology and will understand these issues.” California Sen. Alex Padilla put it plainly: that tech interests will have “a better-informed ear at the presidential level.”
Since her days as California attorney general, Harris had an active interest in technology and how it intersects with society and law enforcement — launching a number of initiatives to better tackle digital crime. In her time in the Senate, she was willing to work with the tech companies and occasionally criticize them publicly in unsparing terms. As vice president, she played a key role in the Biden administration’s artificial intelligence policy — helping lay the groundwork for a major executive order on a key emerging technology area.
Her instincts on technology have been honed by her time as a prosecutor and a former attorney general, and she has brought some of those instincts with her to Washington — as well as her Bay Area connections.
For tech companies, “I would say it’s probably a good news, bad news situation. She was the attorney general and senator from California. The good news is she has familiarity with them,” said one Democratic lobbyist with tech clients. “The bad news is she was the attorney general of California. By definition, she comes at this from a pretty pro-consumer mindset.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, on the Senate subcommittee on competition policy and antitrust, said Republicans’ accusation that Dunn had a “conflict of interest” when leading Harris’ debate prep was “plainly a political shot,” and added, “I’ve seen nothing in her statements as a candidate that would indicate any less commitment to enforcement of antitrust laws.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, too, said he doesn’t foresee a dip in antitrust enforcement should Harris win in November. “As a lawyer and attorney general, she’s much more familiar with the process of law enforcement and civil process of law enforcement, so I think she’ll be a solid voice for good enforcement,” he said.
But pro-business campaign surrogates have been hoping for a different kind of enforcement — one less intent on challenging mergers and testing the limits of long-neglected regulatory laws in the courts.
“In my conversations with people in the campaign, they’re very clear that they are not fans of regulation through litigation,” campaign surrogate and billionaire Mark Cuban told reporters when asked about Harris’ stance on cryptocurrency.
During her time as California’s attorney general, Harris brought tech companies together in 2015 and demanded they do more to tackle “revenge porn” on their platform. She never threatened regulation but demanded they take the topic seriously, according to reporting from Politico.
That’s an approach she also took in the Senate, where she sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee during hearings into Russia’s use of social media sites, and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which investigated data misuse at Facebook. One former tech company staffer remembered fretting about getting executives ready for hearings with Harris.
“I remember prepping hearings knowing she was going to be one of the tougher ones on the dais,” the person recalled.
Harris had a memorably tough exchange with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 over the Cambridge Analytica data leak — but that didn’t necessarily translate into legislation.
“Sometimes hearing theatrics are inversely proportional to legislative action. Legislators pound the table more when they’re less likely to actually legislate,” Kovacevich, of the Chamber of Progress, said.
Harris has gravitated toward tech issues throughout her career. As state attorney general, she started up an eCrime unit, which focused on identity theft and other technology crimes, and a privacy enforcement and protection unit to enforce federal and state privacy laws. She also focused on digital forensics, giving law enforcement tools to extract data from suspects’ phones and created the California Cyber Crime Center initiative in 2016. As vice president, she convened a meeting at the White House with the CEOs of the largest tech companies working on artificial intelligence issues: OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google. That May 2023 meeting laid the groundwork for a White House executive order on AI issued later that year — the first real federal government policy statement on an emerging technology issue, albeit one that’s only binding on government agencies and lacks the regulatory teeth of comprehensive legislation passed by Congress.
“There’s a straight line from the vice president’s involvement to policy outcomes: She got tech CEOs together at the White House, and then they agreed to AI safety commitments. She brought labor and civil rights folks to the table, and then the EO had new AI protections for vulnerable people like tenants and consumers,” said Ami Fields-Meyer, who served as a senior policy adviser to Harris until earlier this year.
Harris’ supporters say her ability to bring Washington and Silicon Valley together in a dialogue is her biggest strength.
“She knows the players, she understands the culture and the motivations of these companies,” Fields-Meyer said. “And she gets the concerns that parents and communities have too. She knows her stuff, and she’s unfazed by complexity.”
Her familiarity with the industry is also what tech companies hope will translate into more influence, sway and voice in policy decisions.
The Biden administration’s approach to tech regulation has almost uniquely won over some populist conservative plaudits — including Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. At the same time, more traditional pro-business Republican voices have voiced concerns about the Biden administration’s agenda. Trump himself is something of a cipher on how he’d approach tech in a second term, especially given that some prominent Silicon Valley voices now have his ear.
While Trump has long attacked censorship by platforms like Meta and Twitter, he has also received the endorsement of a handful of prominent tech CEOs, including Elon Musk, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and others who see him as more willing to work with them.
How Trump’s gut instincts on technology — particularly while he’s got interests in his own digital platform, Truth Social, and has a bevy of new Silicon Valley friends — would translate into policy is anyone’s guess.
“She’s certainly more predictable than Trump and Vance,” said one Washington tech policy veteran. “The markets and investors like predictability.”
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Byron Tau is a reporter at NOTUS. Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.