A Very WIRED Guide to Candidates in the Democratic Debate

After several rounds that had the crowded, chaotic feel of early-season Bachelor episodes, the field for Thursday night’s debate is down to a somewhat more manageable seven candidates: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang. (The rest of the hopefuls failed to meet polling and fundraising thresholds set by the Democratic National Committee.)

With the field starting to winnow out, it feels like a good time to take a look at the candidates’ records and positions on tech policy—especially the difficult question of how giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google should be regulated. This isn’t a comprehensive list; feel free to scroll through each candidate’s campaign site if you simply must know who’s proposing $80 billion for rural broadband and who’s proposing $125 billion. (OK, fine, they are Buttigieg and Steyer, respectively. And for the record, all the candidates support some version of rural broadband.)

Tech policy, which has come up sparingly through the first five debates, is not yet seen as a “kitchen table issue” like health care or taxes. But perhaps it should be. The question of how government should address an economy radically reshaped by digital platforms matters for ordinary Americans. The answers will shape how we shop, how we work, how we make sense of the world around us, even how we vote, and much more.

So here’s hoping we go to bed tonight with a better sense of where the candidates stand. For now, here’s what to expect:

Elizabeth Warren

More than any other candidate, Warren set the tone of the debate over Silicon Valley by coming for the industry early in her campaign. In March, she put out a plan with the blunt title, “Here’s how we can break up Big Tech.” For better or worse, the question of whether to “break them up” has since become the starting point for any discussion about how to regulate the industry.

While Warren identifies a number of problems stemming from internet platforms, she centers her critique on competition. The Massachusetts senator has been sounding the alarm about the dangers of concentration throughout the economy for years, including in old-school sectors like agriculture and insurance. Her aggressive stance on antitrust enforcement of the likes of Facebook and Amazon is a natural extension of the theme.

Warren argues that today’s tech giants—specifically Amazon, Facebook, and Google—stifle innovation and competition by buying up rivals and using their power as platforms to advantage their own offerings. (Think of Google featuring its own restaurant reviews over Yelp’s.) Her plan to restore competition to the internet economy has two major components: First, she proposes legislation requiring the biggest firms to be designated as “platform utilities” and broken apart from divisions that do business on those platforms. So, for example, Amazon the store would have to split apart from Amazon’s in-house product lines; Google search would have to be “spun off” from Google’s ad exchange. Second, Warren vows to appoint regulators who would “reverse illegal and anticompetitive tech mergers” like Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram or Amazon’s purchase of Zappos.

It’s a posture that has not endeared the senator to the executives at Silicon Valley’s biggest firms—especially Facebook, which she has not been shy about beefing with. But, as Recode reported in October, she has been raking in donations from those companies’ employees—a reflection, perhaps, of the growing tension between the C-suites and the rank and file who build the products and services.

Bernie Sanders

On September 5, 2018, Sanders introduced a Senate bill that would have taxed large businesses at a rate of 100 percent of the government benefits paid to their employees. It was called the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act”—or the Stop BEZOS Act. Subtle? No. Effective? Well, a month later, Amazon announced it would raise its minimum wage to $15 per hour for all US employees.

Amazon’s labor practices have long been criticized by progressive activists, and were a natural target for the old-school, pro-union socialist Sanders. Likewise, in his campaign announcement, he singled out the threat of automation to the working class. “I’m running for president because we need to understand that artificial intelligence and robotics must benefit the needs of workers, not just corporate America and those who own that technology,” he declared. To that end, he has suggested requiring firms that outsource or automate labor to redistribute any gains from that strategy—i.e., shares—to American employees displaced by it.

More recently, Sanders has both broadened and sharpened his critique. His August criminal justice plan included a pledge to ban police departments from using facial recognition technology. And while his chief progressive rival Warren tries awkwardly to cater to the Medicare For All crowd, Sanders has, with less fanfare, been moving onto her tech regulation turf. In July, he said he would “absolutely” consider breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google. And earlier this month, he unveiled a plan for rural broadband that wouldn’t just provide government funding—it would go after service providers, forcing the likes of Comcast and AT&T to divest their content-producing divisions like Time Warner and NBCUniversal. Breaking up Amazon might play well on Twitter, but the company remains immensely popular. Cable providers? Not so much. By threatening to wield competition policy against the Comcasts of the world, Sanders could be making a play for the “fix capitalism, don’t get rid of it” vote. Just don’t tell Jacobin!

Joe Biden

The candidate whose campaign slogan promises “No Malarkey” finds himself, appropriately enough, at the center of the fight over misleading political ads—one of the trickiest and potentially most significant debates to play out in Silicon Valley heading into 2020. That fight kicked into high gear this fall after a Trump campaign ad misleadingly insinuated that Biden improperly pressured Ukraine to protect his son—and the Biden campaign unsuccessfully demanded that Facebook pull it. Since then, Biden has publicly mused about reconsidering Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, an increasingly popular target among politicians because of the way it shields tech platforms from liability over the content they host.

Overall, though, Biden has mostly shied away from criticizing the tech industry, even as he finds himself being smeared on social media more than any other candidate. A Politico story after an October debate noted that he was “the quietest person on stage on the question of how to handle Silicon Valley.” When pressed by the reporter, his campaign refused to say anything specific about regulating the tech giants, saying only that it would enforce the law against “all corporations.”

Biden has not so subtly sold himself as an extension of, or a return to, the Obama presidency. Among other things, that administration was notable for its embrace of the Silicon Valley ethos—and cozy relationships with tech CEOs like Google’s Eric Schmidt. So far, Biden has offered little reason to expect anything different if he were in the Oval Office.

Pete Buttigieg

Speaking of being cozy with Silicon Valley! Mayor Pete may be less than half Biden’s age, but he’s making a similar, if less explicit, appeal to Obama-era nostalgia. Like Obama, Buttigieg has been eager to recruit from Silicon Valley’s ranks, and his campaign hasn’t shied from invoking the mythology of the lean, hungry startup. Last month, Fast Company reported that the Buttigieg campaign leads in hiring from tech firms, with 12 staffers overall—including his national political director, Stephen Brokaw, who came straight from Google. Buttigieg has even turned to his former Harvard schoolmate Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, for recommendations, hiring two of their picks.

Buttigieg has also been a darling of Silicon Valley donors. On Monday, according to Recode, he was scheduled to attend a glitzy, $2,800-a-head Palo Alto fundraiser—one of four in the Bay Area this week—hosted by a group including Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and close family members of top executives at Google and Facebook.

In perhaps related news, Buttigieg has yet to come out with any signature policies on tech. When asked about the prospect of breaking up companies like Facebook or Amazon, he tends to deflect by stressing the importance of providing more resources to enforcers at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. Probably his sauciest statement came in response to a Vox questionnaire earlier this month, in which he granted that “breaking up tech companies should be an option.” He also said he would make privacy “a top priority” and favors a federal privacy law that would “place affirmative fiduciary obligations on data collectors—similar to the obligations that doctors and lawyers have to their clients.”

Andrew Yang

“If Yang is the candidate of Silicon Valley, he’s the one driving a Humvee up the wrong side of the 101,” wrote WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson in November. Yang, the necktie-averse entrepreneur turned presidential candidate, attracts an internet-savvy crowd even as he levels harsh critiques at the industry. His candidacy began as a vehicle to advocate for a universal basic income, which he believes is the only way to protect American workers from the inevitable catastrophe of widespread job automation. (Disclosure: I worked for Yang a decade ago when he ran a test-prep company, and we remain on friendly terms.)

As Yang has outlasted more pedigreed candidates, his ambitions have moved beyond the boundaries of the single-issue candidate. Last month, he released a wide-ranging plan titled “Regulating Technology Firms in the 21st Century.” I won’t try to summarize it here; there’s a lot in there. It’s a mix of the eminently sensible (bring back the Office of Technology Assessment to help Congress understand tech issues); the appealing but vague (“Regulate the use of data and privacy by establishing data as a property right”); and the outlandishly heavy-handed and possibly unconstitutional (“Provide guidance and regulation, if needed on design features that maximize screen time for young people, like removing autoplay video for children under 16, removing the queues that allow infinite scrolling, capping the number of recommendations per day, reducing notification signs and ‘like’ counts, and using artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine when children are using devices to cap screen hours per day”).

When it comes to the big question—“Should we break up Big Tech?”—Yang is tough to pin down. He frequently dismisses Warren-style antitrust proposals as “a 20th-century solution to a 21st-century set of problems.” But his substantive arguments about how to regulate platforms could be lifted directly from Warren’s campaign site: “If Amazon is the marketplace,” he argues, “it shouldn’t be competing as a market player, as well.”

Amy Klobuchar

The senator from Minnesota is leaning hard on a folksy, Midwestern, “What can I bring to the potluck?” energy. But she’s stealthily one of the most tech-focused candidates in the race. She even devoted a chunk of her campaign launch speech to it. “Way too many politicians have their heads stuck in the sand when it comes to the digital revolution,” she said. “We need to put some digital rules of the road into law when it comes to people’s privacy. 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.”

As a sitting senator since 2007, Klobuchar has an actual legislative track record to point to. A member of the Senate Broadband Caucus, she has cosponsored a host of tech-related legislation, including the Honest Ads Act—the mere threat of which helped spur Facebook, Google, and Twitter to start voluntarily disclosing who pays for political ads—and a recently introduced federal privacy bill. And as the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, Klobuchar was, along with Warren, at the vanguard of the antimonopolization fight. She also has authored several pieces of legislation that would seriously boost the federal government’s ability to review and block mergers. (Requisite reminder that, in a divided Congress, none of these has stood a chance of becoming law.)

Still, with tech as with so much else, Klobuchar seems determined to stick to relative moderation. Despite her antitrust bona fides, she hasn’t gone full Warren by calling to break up big tech. “I would like to see investigations which are going on right now at the FTC of the different aspects of these monopoly companies,” she told The Washington Post in March. “That’s what I’m pushing for right now, and then you look at the facts and you make a decision then.”

Tom Steyer

One of my favorite characters in the movie Booksmart was Jared, the well-intentioned but cringey rich kid who uses grotesque displays of wealth to try to buy popularity.

Anyhoo, Tom Steyer—the billionaire who has spent more than $25.7 million on Facebook ads this year, slightly more than the rest of the debate participants combined—is still in the race.