Big Tech and Trump: Two books explore their turbulent relationship, future

By Sarah Frier 

THE EVERYTHING WAR: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power

Author: Dana Mattioli

Publisher: Little, Brown

Pages: 390

Price: $32.50 

THE TECH COUP: How to Save Democracy From Silicon Valley

Author: Marietje Schaake

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Pages: 327

Price: $27.95

  Elon Musk wasn’t always such a big fan of Donald Trump. In December 2016, he reluctantly joined Trump’s business advisory council, only to leave it a few months later after the Republican president pulled out of an international climate agreement. Mr Trump also played hot and cold with the tech industry. During his first term in office, he was generally critical of Big Tech tycoons and their power, even as critics lined up to argue that social media platforms, exploited by foreign agents and hyper-political outlets, had helped deliver him to the White House.

 

 

A “techlash” got going under Mr Trump and eventually became vaguely bipartisan. Democrats contended that social media platforms allowed right-wing radicalism to flourish, while Republicans decried what they saw as limits on conservative expression. There have been dozens of congressional hearings involving tech companies on issues including privacy, political bias, election integrity, child safety, content moderation and algorithms, and there are now US government investigations into — and in some cases, litigation against — Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Tesla, among others.

 

In the last few years, Democrats especially have shown that they would like to see more accountability from these companies and perhaps break a few of them up. So it may be no surprise that tech moguls are ready to give Mr Trump another chance. Mr Musk, after spending more than $250 million on Trump’s re-election, has signed on to help slash the federal budget as co-leader of a brand-new Department of Government Efficiency. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, refused to let his newspaper, The Washington Post, endorse Vice-President Kamala Harris, and recently said, about the prospect of a second Trump presidency, that he’s “very optimistic this time around.” Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive whose social networks took a more hands-off approach to election misinformation than they had in earlier cycles, called the way Mr Trump reacted to being nearly assassinated “badass.” But the honeymoon might not last. As two recent books show, Mr Trump’s relationship with tech companies has been volatile, and could be again if he senses disloyalty from his newfound allies.

 

In The Everything War  the Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli focuses on Amazon’s insatiable quest for growth and market control — from Mr Bezos’ bet on the World Wide Web in the 1990s to the company’s transformation into a behemoth that regularly tangles with American presidents.

 

Ms Mattioli describes Bezos as Trump’s “nemesis,” noting that the president-elect was obsessed with The Post’s criticism of him during his 2016 campaign. At dinner the following year, Mr Bezos tried to explain press freedom to  Mr Trump, to no avail. “The president couldn’t believe that an owner of a newspaper wouldn’t use it to attack his enemies and wouldn’t influence coverage,” Ms Mattioli writes. In 2018, when Amazon was the front-runner for a cloud computing contract with the Pentagon, she reports, Mr Trump told his secretary of defence, Jim Mattis, to “screw” the company and scuttle the deal.

 

This thoroughly reported book explores Amazon’s strategies to thwart threats to its dominance — and make friends at the White House despite Mr Trump’s attitude toward Mr Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 but is still the company’s largest shareholder. Ms Mattioli also delves into Amazon’s history with the other person the company is scared of in Washington: The current chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan. Under Ms Khan, the FTC has sued Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power — a development she had been scrutinising since law school.  Mr Trump is expected to replace her, though his Vice President-elect, J D Vance, has expressed support for her efforts. With Mr Trump in charge and tech moguls falling into line, at least for the moment, is there any hope for checking the tech industry’s worst impulses in the near future? In The Tech Coup , the  Financial Times  columnist Marietje Schaake lays out how tech companies have become ever more entrenched in basic services, leading to “declining standards and freedoms.” She wants governments to proactively prevent companies from harming citizens, and provides a road map for doing so.

 

Today, governments rely heavily on private companies for cybersecurity help, and one of Ms Schaake’s proposals is that countries should make more of the world’s digital infrastructure public. Mr Musk, for instance, has had the power to control internet connectivity during the war in Ukraine, because the country’s military relies on his Starlink satellites for their operations. “Digitisation has empowered authoritarian regimes,” Ms Schaake writes, “while democratic societies misguidedly continue to trust that free markets will lead to free societies.”

 

Ms Schaake is a Dutch former member of the European Parliament, where ideas about stronger tech oversight have received a more enthusiastic hearing than in the United States. Many of her suggestions would require extensive regulation and meet with intense resistance from the US Congress.

 

Still, Ms Schaake reminds readers that the need for tech accountability has found rare bipartisan consensus in the United States. As president, Mr Trump tried to ban TikTok in the United States through an executive order; the Biden administration turned that effort into law. But with Republicans in control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, sweeping change that may have been impossible in a prior administration could come more quickly.

 

The reviewer is the author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. ©2024 The New York Times News Service