Вот что мы знаем (и не знаем) о Камале Харрис и технической политике

Vice president Kamala Harris is all but certain to become the Democratic presidential candidate. She was abruptly catapulted to front-runner position for the Democratic presidential nomination after president Joe Biden ended his reelection run and endorsed her for the position, and now key power brokers in the organization have publically backed her. If elected, Harris would be a president with roots in California’s Bay Area — the heart of the tech industry.

Despite her ties to this region, Harris is mostly a cipher erstwhile it comes to tech policy. As vice president, she is inherently connected to all policy of the Biden administration, but it’s hard to untangle which parts she would proceed and which she would change. Her key focus areas as vice president — including artificial intelligence — and her interests as a senator and, before that, as California’s lawyer general and San Francisco’s territory attorney, supply a fistful of insights into what she might prioritize if she should become president.

We know where she stands on climate, we have any sense of how she feels about privacy, and we have a full array of tantalizing statements about AI, but there is simply a wide scope of key questions that she has yet to be asked or has successfully avoided answering. She remains an enigma erstwhile it comes to tech antitrust and the TikTok ban. And she has yet to talk straight to the issues that most concern the moneyed donor class of Silicon Valley, specified as crypto regulation.

“I think this is simply a large chance for the Democratic organization to do a small bit of introspection and say — where have they lost certain communities?” Box CEO Aaron Levie, who frequently donates to Democratic candidates, told The Verge in an interview. He said the organization has seen “missed opportunities” with the tech and business community, like in pushing for taxes on unrealized gains and failing to update the H-1B visa program for high-skilled workers. Ultimately, he hopes for “a bit of a reset on any of either the policy initiatives, or just the the speech and the message from the party.”

For those in the tech industry, Harris’ policy stances are not peculiarly well known, says venture capitalist and political strategist Bradley Tusk. A run manager for Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral campaign, Tusk says that’s mostly due to the fact that most tech regulation occurs at the state level, “so it’s not like she had this track evidence in the Senate, simply due to the fact that they just don’t do very much.” That means there’s a lot to be learned in the next fewer weeks on where Harris plants her feet on a variety of tech issues.

The Verge took a look into how the vice president’s background and legislative past could inform what a Harris presidency could mean for tech — the industry, the workforce, and its impact on consumers.

Many of the fresh legislative efforts to rein in the power of the largest tech companies gained momentum after Harris left the Senate. She was never 1 of the more outspoken politicians on antitrust policy to begin with. During the 2020 election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was the candidate out front calling for the breakup of large tech companies. Naturally, in 2019, The fresh York Times asked Harris point-blank whether firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google should be broken up. alternatively of giving a direct answer, she steered the conversation to privacy regulation.

Still, she’s left open the anticipation of enforcement. besides that year, she told CNN that “we gotta seriously take a look at” breaking up Facebook. She besides called the platform “essentially a utility that has gone unregulated.”

The Biden administration’s antitrust policy — as enacted by the enforcers he appointed, specified as the national Trade Commission’s Lina Khan and the Department of Justice’s Jonathan Kanter — has been aggressive, possibly even unprecedentedly so. It’s not clear whether a Harris administration would keep that up. The question she dodged in 2019 will be increasingly hard to avoid now that she’s facing down a self-proclaimed tech antitrust advocate in Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (OH).

Whichever way Harris chooses, she’ll find any friends in Silicon Valley, which itself has divided on the issue of antitrust. (The most direct beneficiaries of antitrust policy, after all, are the rival companies.) “There’s not a dinner that I’ve been at where 3 people can agree on an antitrust policy,” Levie said. “I have friends that are the most ardent supporters of capitalism, of free markets, that besides like what Lina Khan does to keep large Tech in check.”

When avoiding the Times’ question about breaking up large tech in 2019, Harris said that “the tech companies have got to be regulated in a way that we can guarantee and the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised.” She added, “My first precedence is going to be that we guarantee that privacy is something that is intact.”

The message sounds strong, but it doesn’t actually say much about what substantive policies she will endorse. She and another legislators grilled Mark Zuckerberg in a public proceeding in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, but her adversarial comments at the time were more or little in line with the tenor of the full hearing.

There is 1 area of privacy in which Harris has had a strong, substantive record: government and enforcement targeting the sharing of nonconsensual images. But this circumstantial issue has not materialized into a more generalized policy position on data privacy — rather, it has been an extension of her work around online sex trafficking.

While serving in the legislature between 2017 and 2021, Harris’ legislative focus on tech mostly centered around preventing the spread of nonconsensual images on the internet. For example, in 2017, she introduced the Ending Nonconsensual Online User Graphic Harassment (ENOUGH) Act, which sought to make it a crime to knowingly distribute or endanger to distribute nonconsensual intimate images. She besides introduced the Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution Act (SHIELD) Act in 2019, likewise criminalizing the distribution of these kinds of images. That bill recently passed the Senate after it was reintroduced by Harris ally Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

Her work in this area predates her entry into Washington, DC. While she was California lawyer general, Harris secured a guilty plea over a hacking strategy to bargain intimate images off of people’s Google accounts.

Nonconsensual images and sex trafficking are not the same thing. But legislative and prosecutorial action directed at either have run into the same issue: Section 230, a legal liability shield for online platforms. While Section 230 does not immunize an individual from spreading nonconsensual images or sexually exploiting someone, erstwhile it comes to the modern era, the most sweepingly powerful action is to intervene at the level of the platform, whether that platform is simply a juggernaut like Google or a nonprofit like Wikipedia. The creation of carve-outs to Section 230 for both nonconsensual images and sexual exploitation follows more or little the same model with the same stakeholders and the same legal issues.

Notably, Harris pressed criminal charges against the top executives of Backpage.com, a personals website that hosted advertisements for sex work. After becoming a senator, Harris besides voted in favour of FOSTA-SESTA, a law excluding sex trafficking from Section 230. (FOSTA-SESTA was, in part, a reaction to Backpage.) As with all laws implicating speech, there are concerns that FOSTA-SESTA was besides broad. Sex workers and their allies have argued that the law puts them in more danger, since uncovering clients online allowed for a degree of vetting and information sharing with others in the manufacture that’s little readily available now. The FOSTA-SESTA controversy likely isn’t over.

As vice president, Harris was tasked with being a point individual in the administration on AI policy, leading roundtables for both leading companies in the industry and labor and civilian rights leaders.

Companies and labs developing advanced AI are facing increasing regulatory scrutiny due to the technology’s associated risks, including privacy issues, occupation displacement, bias and discrimination, deepfakes, AI-powered weapons, and the controversial possible of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could make these systems as intelligent as their human creators. To mitigate unforeseen risks, tech leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have urged the government to regulate AI.

Harris agrees, calling for “legislation that strengthens AI safety without stifling innovation” in an AI safety summit in the UK last November. At the summit, Harris said that they should “consider and address the full spectrum of AI hazard — threats to humanity as a whole, as well as threats to individuals, communities, to our institutions, and to our most susceptible populations.”

In March, Harris announced a government-wide policy that required US national agencies to show that their AI tools aren’t harming the public. (If they can’t meet those guidelines, they must cease utilizing the system.) She has actively voiced concerns about how training data can introduce harmful biases and could wind up discriminating against susceptible populations erstwhile utilized at scale.

“And erstwhile people around the planet cannot discern fact from fiction due to a flood of AI-enabled mis- and disinformation, I ask, is that not existential for democracy?” Harris said at the UK summit.

Levie said the current administration hasn’t had “major missteps in AI,” though he wishes they’d come out powerfully in favour of open-source AI. But he sees it as more of a forward-looking issue. “I think the concern you could have is, the next 4 years are the most important, probably, for AI regulation. And so to any extent, you do gotta believe that the organization has the wherewithal to make truly good decisions,” he said.

In April, the US enacted a law that could ban the popular social media platform TikTok as shortly as January (unless its parent company, ByteDance, decides to sale it off). Even though president Biden signed the bill, Harris told reporters that a ban was not the goal.

“We request to deal with the owner and we have national safety concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok,” Harris told ABC News in March. She besides added that TikTok has “very important” benefits, like serving as an income generator and “allowing people to share information in a free way.”

When asked about her circumstantial views on TikTok during an onstage interview at The fresh York Times DealBook Summit last November, Harris declined to comment.

The Biden administration has had a less-than-rosy relation with the crypto manufacture due to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler’s stance on how it should be regulated. Tusk said that he expects Harris will improve relations with the sector, even if it’s just by putting in her own SEC chair choice alternatively of Gensler.

Meanwhile, Republican nominee and erstwhile president Donald Trump and his moving mate, Vance, have indicated they would be open to a little regulated environment for crypto — Trump is even slated to talk at a crypto conference over the weekend. This deregulatory attitude has reportedly attracted $160 million in run contributions to the Republican organization from the crypto manufacture as well as public backing from the likes of prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. (Their firm, a16z, has a $4.5 billion crypto fund.)

As vice president, Harris has been tasked with addressing the “root causes” of immigration from Central America. In that role, she focused in part on strengthening the economics of the region and secured private sector commitments from companies including Meta to aid train entrepreneurs and tiny business owners there and aid women build their online presence and access financial services. Under Biden, the Department of Homeland safety has ramped up its usage of border surveillance technology, a practice that could proceed during a Harris presidency.

The right has already zeroed in on Harris’ tenure as the alleged “border czar,” even though her actual function was focused on diplomacy with Central America. But immigration is much more than a border issue, and Harris would likely proceed Biden’s policies with respect to legal immigration and visas. A key interest of the tech sector is in maintaining or expanding the H-1B visa program, which lets high-skilled workers stay in the country to work in highly specialized jobs. As a senator, Harris worked with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to introduce the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which would “remove per-country caps for employment-based green cards,” according to a press release. “We must do more to destruct discriminatory backlogs and facilitate household unity so that high-skilled immigrants are not susceptible to exploitation and can stay in the U.S. and proceed to contribute to the economy,” she said in a message at the time. She has not spoken on the issue more recently.

Harris is much more of a known quantity erstwhile it comes to climate and energy policy. For that reason, she has already garnered support from any major environmental groups and business leaders in clean energy. That includes the League of Conservation Voters that rates lawmakers based on their environmental track records and has given Harris a 90 percent on her scorecard.

The Biden administration managed to pass legislation marking the biggest investments in clean energy and climate yet in the US. And the Environmental Protection Agency under Biden and Harris has introduced sweeping fresh contamination regulations for cars, power plants, and industrial facilities. All in all, the measures could transform the way Americans get around, how their homes are built, and how they get their energy.

Nevertheless, the US is inactive not on track to meet climate goals it set under the Paris agreement of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent by the end of the decade. Donald Trump could effort to wipe existing climate policies off the books.

Harris is expected to defend those policies, of course. And there’s even any hope among climate advocates that she could go farther than Biden to crack down on fossil fuels. Harris has taken a tougher stance, for instance, on fracking — going as far as filing suit against the Obama administration to halt offshore fracking back erstwhile she was California’s lawyer general.

Having spent most of her political career either in California or representing it, tech and amusement companies were among the top contributors to Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign. According to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks political donations and groups together organizations’ political action committee (PAC) spending and worker donations, the University of California was the top contributor to her run at $209,00. Harris raised $144,00 from Alphabet, $137,000 from Disney, and $134,000 from AT&T.

Her 2016 legislature campaign saw support from people from akin groups, including Comcast, Apple, and Cisco. She besides got support from Venable, a law firm where her husband, Doug Emhoff, worked at the time, overseeing its Los Angeles and San Francisco offices. Emhoff represented clients in the amusement manufacture as well as large corporations like Walmart and Merck, according to The fresh York Times.

Harris, who was born in Oakland, has any individual connections in the tech manufacture as well. Her brother-in-law, for example, is Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. She besides attended the wedding of Napster cofounder and erstwhile Facebook president Sean Parker, according to The Washington Post.

None of these ties or donations elucidate what a Harris presidency means for tech. Despite being from the area, she is not a Silicon Valley politician; despite being 1 of those leading the most successful push to whittle down the immunity shield of Section 230, she is not an anti-tech politician, either.

But in an election year that saw both the passage of the TikTok ban and the once-in-a-generation DOJ antitrust suit against Apple, there are tech policy questions that Kamala Harris can’t avoid forever. The GOP ticket has already articulated its position — coherent or not — on some of those issues. It will be Harris’ turn shortly enough.