Noah Kulwin

It’s entirely possible Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal will die before being implemented. The first obstacle could arrive as soon as July. Should Democratic-leaning FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn leave the FCC at the end of June as expected, it would leave the body one commissioner short of a quorum, meaning the FCC wouldn’t be able to vote on Chairman Pai’s proposal. (Adding commissioners would likely mean picking yet another fight with congressional Democrats.)

The 1946 Administrative Procedure Act bars “capricious” rulemaking at federal agencies, and experts anticipate credible legal challenges against Chairman Pai’s proposal for not rising above that standard, especially because of how the FCC has bungled public comment.

Hillary Clinton went with a pretty vanilla choice for her running mate: Sen Tim Kaine (D-VA). Though he’s relative unknown to most of the country and, by extension, Silicon Valley, Sen Kaine will provide yet another reason to not vote for Donald Trump. He toes a Clinton-like line about appropriately balancing privacy and security when it comes tech encryption, and he has proposed legislation for “technical” education programs.

When he served as the governor of Virginia (and as a senator), he supported expanding broadband Internet access. Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Technology Association trade group, praised Kaine as an ally of the tech industry. Sen Kaine’s open support for free trade policies, the kind of thing that Silicon Valley people really like to hear, is a rarity in this election cycle. Both Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Donald Trump have loudly criticized the in-progress Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and Hillary Clinton has done the same — albeit with a fraction of the same conviction. But for Silicon Valley, Sen Kaine’s biggest asset is a very simple one: His running mate is not Donald Trump.

Donald Trump used his favorite hailing frequency, Twitter, to confirm his selection of Gov Mike Pence (R-IN) as his vice presidential running mate. The choice is bound to make conservatives within the Republican party happy — though the he’s unlikely to win the hearts and minds of anyone in the tech industry. Indeed, his selection is likely to provoke the ire of many leaders in Silicon Valley, 70 of whom aligned against an anti-LGBT measure that Gov Pence signed into law in 2015. Some of the technology industry’s most prominent executives — among them Apple’s Tim Cook and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff — vocally protested the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a “religious liberty bill” that they warned would open the door to legalizing discrimination against minority groups.

Of course, Trump isn’t courting Silicon Valley with his choice of Gov Pence. The first-term governor and former congressman is there to make the GOP’s evangelical wing happy. He’s a guy who described himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.” For Silicon Valley, which has aggressively used corporate muscle on issues of LGBT rights, it seems Trump’s likely pick might be the worst possible selection he could have made.