Darrell West

With a White House and Senate under Democratic control, passing sweeping legislation may be a challenge for House Republicans, but it’s likely that they will apply pressure on the current and forthcoming tech policy goals of the Biden-Harris administration. Despite Republicans’ concerns with the current administration’s spending, closing the digital divide should be an area of opportunity for bipartisan action, especially since many Republicans have constituents in severely underserved rural areas.

While it is not out of the question that California’s tough privacy law plus follow-up action by other states could encourage Congress to enact legislation, working out issues regarding the right to sue and state preemption controversies would be easier with a Democratic President, House, and Senate than divided party control. In the latter situation, Joe Biden would have to find a few Senators willing to buck their party and vote with him to resolve those issues. Such a coalition could happen, but these kinds of negotiations always are lengthy and complicated.

Some experts are arguing that digital services by their very nature represent interstate commerce and therefore are best dealt with by Congress. In order to avoid the fragmentation of state-centered markets, it is necessary to have uniform standards, not state or local statutes. Given the current composition of the US Supreme Court, a majority of justices could endorse that interpretation of the interstate commerce clause and sharply limits the ability of state and local governments to impose rules on digital services or technology innovation.

A string of controversies in recent years involving tech companies has led many observers to call for stronger antitrust enforcement and a tougher competition policy. A new addition to this public demand comes from an unlikely source: In Nov 2018, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case brought by Apple to dismiss a lawsuit from Robert Pepper and three other iPhone owners. The defendants in Apple Inc. v. Pepper accuse the company of acting like a monopolist by controlling which apps to publish in its app store, taking a cut of sales, and prohibiting other app distributors.

As our economy becomes increasingly digitized, more transactions are moving online and outside of local tax jurisdictions, costing states billions in lost sales tax revenue. The recent Supreme Court decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair has opened the door for states to collect sales tax on online purchases made at out-of-state businesses. Applying state taxes on interstate commerce could not only recover lost revenues, but also make national e-commerce companies more invested in state government.

As citizens increasingly use digital tools to engage with government, federal agencies should weed out fake comments to create a more robust public comment system. If agencies are required to solicit public input, it should take on a form that the agency can easy incorporate into new rules. The Administrative Procedures Act could not have anticipated the digital communications tools available to citizens seven decades later. An updated method of collecting feedback would require commenters to verify their identity, or at least verify they are human.

In this report, I inaugurate the first in a series of big data analyses that will chart long-term trends. In the same way that researchers track political, economic, and social activities, it is useful to deploy social media and event histories to identify patterns in internet search behavior regarding President Doanld Trump. Using this information, I find several important developments:

Governments should promote news literacy and strong professional journalism in their societies. The news industry must provide high-quality journalism in order to build public trust and correct fake news and disinformation without legitimizing them. Technology companies should invest in tools that identify fake news, reduce financial incentives for those who profit from disinformation, and improve online accountability. Educational institutions should make informing people about news literacy a high priority.

Beyond communication, smartphones have become indispensable for everything from banking to transportation in the decade since the launch of the iPhone. Through mobile broadband or Wi-Fi, smartphones deliver internet access that is increasingly important in today’s economy. The devices can also improve healthcare outcomes by reminding patients of their appointments and treatments. Given the ability of smartphones to connect users to government services, lawmakers should consider making them more widely available.

The Trump campaign of 2016 will doubtlessly go down as one of the most dramatic and sensational in history, especially considering Trump’s tendency to spark national controversy on Twitter. Although the president-elect’s style of social media usage is of a kind highly unusual in the political sphere, the rising importance of digital media in presidential campaigns cannot be solely attributed to one candidate. The use of social media as a major campaign strategy was first pioneered by President Barack Obama in the 2008 election and was repeated successfully in 2012. His strategy encompassed a range of elements, including Facebook, online fundraising, and a YouTube channel, paired with more traditional forms of outreach via phone and direct mail.

The millennial generation (those born between 1981 and 1998) has been a driving force behind the rise of social media and is attributed with tipping the scales in President Obama’s favor both election cycles. Given that social media has become an integral component of the political process during a time of dramatic polarization, there is a concern that the digital world has become a means to filter out opposing opinions from one’s personal online universe – creating an “echo chamber.” Data from the Pew Research Center reveal that the echo chamber is not necessarily born of a refusal to consider opposing viewpoints, but has developed out of the negative political climate and of the desire to avoid confrontation.