Biden ropes in 2 major critics of Big Tech companies for key roles in the administration

US President Joe Biden has pulled in two major critics, Lina Khan and Tim Wu, of the Big Tech companies for key roles in the administration. This signals a tough times are ahead for Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple.

The selection of Khan as a nominee to the Federal Trade Commission, according to a report in CNBC, leaves little room for doubt that the administration hopes to see robust enforcement of antitrust laws and other regulations in the tech space.

Khan has worked for the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, helping to compile the nearly 450-page report accusing the four tech giants of maintaining monopoly power and suggesting a major overhaul of the antitrust laws and their enforcement.

Wu, as per NPR, worked on tech policy in the Obama administration and is known for coining the term “net neutrality”. He says the tech giants have create a new Gilded Age, much like the robber barons did in the industrial era with the railroad and oil monopolies. Wu has notedly advocated for breaking up Facebook. In his public remarks, he asks audiences to think deeply about what it means to pay with data, rather than with traditional forms of payment and whether societies are worse off when technology gets better. Wu makes the stand case that collective action by consumers must persist and push technology giants in directions that will define how we live, work and thrive in the age of algorithmic mediation.

In his January interview with the New York Times, Biden slammed big tech companies and argued that online platforms should not be allowed immunity for content posted by users. US Senator Elizabeth Warren called for legislation to restrict large tech platforms from owning and participating in a marketplace at the same time. She said she would also nominate regulators to unwind anticompetitive mergers such as Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, and Amazon’s deal for the Whole Foods supermarket chain.

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Warren has also criticized Facebook’s policy of exempting politicians’ ad from fact-checking, running deliberately false ads that claimed Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Trump’s re-election bid.