According to a recent report by Axios, Vice President JD Vance is set to play a key role in regulating big tech, a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s platform that converges several sticking points for Trump’s base: monopolies, religion and China.
This is not much of a surprise. As a former venture capitalist who is buddies with countercultural Silicon Valley heavyweights Peter Thiel and Marc Andressen, Vance certainly has a perspective on how the administration ought to govern big tech. While the vice president has little executive power — in the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, John Garner, the vice presidency is “not worth a bucket of warm piss” — Vance at times seems better able to articulate Trumpism than Trump himself. Relegated to the Eisenhower building as he may be, Vance is an ideological lighthouse for the Trump administration.
Vance’s beliefs about the governance of technology generally align with techno-optimism, which contends that technology is a primary driver of human flourishing. “We shouldn’t be fearful of new technologies. In fact, we should seek to dominate them,” Vance said last month. Here, Vance straddles a contradiction between two facets of Trump’s base. On the one hand, techno-optimism seems to elevate the transformative innovations made by big tech — i.e., the largest and most influential tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. Indeed, Vance believes that the U.S. should remove regulatory barriers to innovation. But the obscene wealth of Silicon Valley, where Vance launched his career, may be at odds with MAGA’s populist narrative about empowering the working class.
At the American Dynamism Summit last month, Vance clarified the administration’s ideological approach to technology. Addressing the tension between populism and techno-optimism, Vance said he is “a proud member of both tribes.” He cited the threat of Chinese dominance in AI and other advanced tech as the reason the U.S. needs to be “tech forward.” He said that cheap labor is a drug for Western economies and that American outsourcing of manufacturing to China has accelerated China’s progress while hindering American innovation. The problem with this narrative is that tech advancement will ultimately lead to automation, which will further reduce manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Regardless of whether you find the narrative convincing, Vance is evidently trying to navigate the tension between political legitimacy (creating jobs) and national power (beating China at tech).
In the same speech, Vance referenced Pope John Paul II to anchor his understanding of tech governance: “Through work, man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology, and above all to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives.” In practice, we see Vance’s Christian and conservative values drive his treatment of big tech. During his career in the Senate, Vance was vocal about wanting to break up the mega corporations in the style of Teddy Roosevelt’s turn of the century trust-busting. While counterparts like Andressen believe big tech hampers start-up innovation, Vance’s motivation seems to have ideological elements. He has oftentimes accused big tech of censoring conservative and Christian viewpoints, a perspective which is widely held in the MAGA camp and has been explored at length by conservative think tanks like the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Vance, and the broader Trump administration, believe in conservative leadership that counters liberal concentrations of power not with libertarian reservedness, but with more power. “American conservatives are still terrified of wielding power,” Vance said last year, adding that the Department of Justice should be filled with appointees who “actually take a side in the culture war” and “stop the technology oligarchs from censoring American conservatives.” Less than two months after Trump took office, his administration controversially fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, a traditionally independent agency and a key overseer of antitrust cases, in order to align the agency with the White House.
How the Trump administration will reconcile their populist drive to break up big tech and their desire for American technological dominance remains to be seen. The tech giants have worked hard to woo the president — donating millions to Trump’s inaugural fund and pledging billions in domestic investment. But so far, this doesn’t seem to have gotten them off the hook, as practically all of the tech giants are facing antitrust scrutiny right now. Since big tech is at the forefront of AI innovation, can the Trump administration really afford to go after it?
The answer might be that powerful leadership can be flexible, providing leniency where American competitiveness is at stake. Since Trump is trying to populate traditionally neutral agencies with aligned conservatives, he could also use this greater influence over the executive branch to mitigate the penalties for tech companies that the administration perceives are key to national power. For example, even though Trump’s Justice Department is calling for a divestment of Chrome from Google, they also argued that Google should be able to keep its investments in artificial intelligence, even if other parts of the company are broken up.
Another question is, can Vance, in coordination with the rest of the Trump administration, really reduce “censorship” and “bias” in the private sector through antitrust work? The case that the FTC assembled against Meta sheds some light on this. Censorship shows up in the commission’s opening statement only to highlight concern among Facebook users about being censored on the app, which spiked in 2020. This was presumably to demonstrate that even despite having concerns about being censored, Facebook users stayed on the platform because Meta has cultivated a monopoly in the space. In general, whatever motivations lead to antitrust cases being taken up by the administration, these cases are evaluated based on factors related to anti-competitive behavior, not censorship.
Since antitrust is ultimately a roundabout way to target their concern about censorship, another approach that Vance and the wider Trump administration might take is to push for Section 230 reforms. Section 230 is a piece of legislation that protects internet platform companies from liability for the content generated on their platforms. This protection is a large reason why these companies are able to exist in the first place. But changes to Section 230 could allow the Trump administration to have more oversight over their content moderation practices. As a senator, Vance advocated for the repeal of Section 230, specifically for big tech companies. While the executive branch can’t change the law, it could try to limit the immunity granted by Section 230, call for increased transparency from big tech on their content moderation policies and support new legislation that amends or scraps Section 230.
The administration could also leverage antitrust scrutiny to compel cultural shifts in big tech. Mark Zuckerberg’s steering of Meta over the past several months shows that the Trump administration doesn’t necessarily need to make changes to Section 230 to influence a culture shift in big tech. Shortly before Trump took office, Zuckerberg relaxed Meta’s content restrictions, which many interpreted as an attempt, at least in part, to curry favor with the new administration.
As the Trump administration’s big tech policies unfold, don’t be fooled by Vance’s calls for deregulating tech as a sign that this administration will be conservative about wielding influence. They will deregulate only where they believe it makes sense to them, and lean into regulation when it serves their anchoring beliefs about national power and cultural conservatism.
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