With the presidential election of 2020 presumably decided in favor of President-elect Joe Biden, what does the political future hold for the tech industry?

That was the focus of Lincoln Reboot 2020, a three-day virtual event ending today that was organized by the Lincoln Network, a right-leaning political organization that brings together technologists, government officials and policy organizations in an open forum.

Issues such as content moderation by social media firms, cybersecurity, 5G deployment and defense funding occupied much of the conference discussion, but there was also an underlying question about how much influence the technology industry will actually wield.

That question was openly raised on Monday as speculation grew over a traditional meeting between technology leaders and the president-elect, such as the gathering that occurred in a small New York conference room during December of 2016 with a newly elected Donald J. Trump. In attendance four years ago were about 20 tech executives, including chief executives Tim Cook of Apple Inc., Larry Page of Google LLC, Satya Nadella of Microsoft Corp. and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. It was a limited representation for what was perhaps the most influential industry in the world.

“How did they all fit around that table?” asked Cory Doctorow, special adviser for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s a far more important question than what they were discussing around that table.”

Many of the subjects covered at the gathering four years ago, such as defense funding, broadband deployment and cybersecurity, will likely be the focus again if a similar event were to occur. But a global pandemic has reordered governmental priorities and a number of speakers took a realistic view that tech’s agenda may take a back seat.

“There will not be a lot of political capital and will to focus on cybersecurity over the next two years,” Eli Sugarman, director of the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation, said during a Lincoln appearance on Friday. “I think the administration is going to have to fight tooth and nail to get things done that people are clamoring for and cybersecurity is going to have to wait its turn in line.”

Content moderation still hot

Joining cybersecurity in the queue will also be the simmering debate around content moderation on social media platforms and the fate of Section 230 as part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. This particular provision of the law, which shields websites from liability created by content postings from users, has come under intense scrutiny this year after concerns were raised around efforts by Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to restrict certain dialogue, including some posts by the President Trump.

In May, Trump signed an executive order limiting the legal protections offered by Section 230 and in October, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission declared that the agency would “clarify the meaning” of the act. This is a course of action opposed by some in the tech community and a former FCC commissioner as well.

“We would appreciate being able to have a more substantive and thoughtful discussion about Section 230,” Tiffany Moore, senior vice president of political and industry affairs at the Consumer Technology Association, said during a Friday session on the topic. “This is a conversation that should be in Congress and not the FCC.”

Moore’s position on Section 230 was reinforced later that day during an appearance by Mignon Clyburn, who served as FCC Commissioner from 2009 to 2018. Clyburn is now president of a Washington D.C.-based consulting firm and was named this week to the board of directors for RingCentral Inc.

“Both presidential candidates have expressed reservations about Section 230,” Clyburn noted. “It is not an FCC thing, it is a Congressional thing. The FCC has no role here.”

The issue of content moderation remains a hot button within the tech industry itself and it has led some companies to take action that has only roiled the waters further. Mailchimp Inc. revised its guidelines in September to warn that it may remove content sent via its email marketing platform.

And in October, the CEO of Expensify Inc. sent a message to the company’s customers that defined the business case for voting against Trump in November. These actions have not been greeted warmly by some figures in the tech industry.

“Mailchimp and Expensify have a right to do that and we have a right not to use them,” Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Inc. and founding partner at 8VC, said during a Lincoln conference interview on Monday. “I’d like it if the basic technology I like to use doesn’t have to decide how ‘woke’ it is.”

Agency opportunities

Whether Congress or the new administration will take action to address specific tech issues such as Section 230 remains to be seen, but some observers believe that the industry has more attractive opportunities within federal agencies to advance existing programs.

One of these areas involves broadband and 5G deployment. In April, the FCC released a report on U.S. broadband deployment that revealed divisions among commissioners around the current level of progress. While the report showed that high-speed broadband service, defined as 250 megabits per second or higher, can now be accessed by 85% of U.S. citizens, at least one current commissioner criticized the agency for continued favoritism toward fiber networks over wireless hotspots and 5G.

“The agency has a tendency to favor legacy providers,” said former FCC Commissioner Clyburn. “We get too little for too much. The agency needs to challenge itself to adopt a more entrepreneurial mindset.”

At the Department of Defense, well-funded tech companies are beginning to edge out traditional contractors for new business. Last year, Palantir beat out Raytheon Inc. for an $800 million Army contract to develop battlefield software.

After winning a major contract to leverage AI technology for the military in 2019, Andruil Industries Inc., followed that up with a lucrative $950 million deal in September to develop a sensor-based system across military branches. And SpaceX Inc. won its first Department of Defense award to build military satellites in October.

The concern among some in the industry is that all three companies are led by technology billionaires – Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk – who have the resources to compete for lucrative military contracts, at the expense of smaller startup firms, thereby cutting off future funding for innovative technologies.

“Being able to fundraise your way through the valley of death becomes really problematic,” Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund, said during a discussion of venture funding for defense innovation on Friday. “We need the eccentric billionaire to make anything work. There is an increasing awareness of this shortfall.”

The problem that continues to confront the technology world going forward is that Washington still doesn’t understand tech and the industry doesn’t understand Washington. That has been highlighted over the past two years as a parade of high-profile tech executives defended the actions of their companies in front of confused legislators, one of whom asked the CEO of Google if he could fix an iPhone problem and another queried the top executive at Facebook over how his firm made money.

“How do we think and what are our politics?” asked Parker Thompson, general partner at TNT Ventures. “D.C. fundamentally doesn’t understand both of those things. Silicon Valley is phenomenally unsophisticated about policy and politics, we just don’t understand very much at all.”

Image: Lincoln Network