Big Tech’s Forever War (TRANSCRIPT)

Arjun Singh 0:03
Arjun from the levers. Reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh. Last year, tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk made big and bold bets on Donald Trump's presidency. In January, billionaires and millionaires representing America's biggest tech firms flew to DC to celebrate Trump's inauguration, and it's clear that they wanted something in return after the Biden administration took big swings at big tech the Big Five tech firms all found themselves under government scrutiny, but the big question is, Will that continue under Donald Trump? It's obvious the tech giants hope that their relationship with Trump means it won't, but when it comes to regulating tech, Trump is something of a wild card. In his first administration, Trump made surprising moves to rein in companies like Google, and recently, the White House said it would continue some of Biden's lawsuits. But is this a tech backlash or a sign that Tech has officially taken over? Today on lever time, we'll hear the story of one tech billionaire who hoped to take out the regulators investigating him, and we'll hear from several major antitrust experts, including Rohit Chopra, the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about the different Ways big tech is running afoul of the law the

Speaker 1 1:22
uh, just to sort of start, I think that the idea that tech was anti government, or somehow separate from the government is kind of PR because, like, who created the internet was the DOD, right? Like this all this is all, you know, the military industrial complex from the jump. So in some ways, this is a kind of natural development that we're going back to where this all started, which is the government.

Arjun Singh 1:49
This is Elizabeth lopato, a senior writer at The Verge who covers how the internet is changing our relationship with money. A few weeks ago, I called Elizabeth up because I wanted to talk about a notorious tech billionaire who's become a staunch ally of the Trump administration, Mark Andreessen. I'm

Unknown Speaker 2:04
coming to you

Arjun Singh 2:06
live today from Silicon Valley, where we are very privileged to be a full participant in the in the IT revolution, and really help drive forward all of this new technology that's leading to these tremendous changes in the economy and in the society. This is Andreessen during an internet Town Hall in 1999 and the guy he was talking to was then President Bill Clinton, less than 30 years old. In this clip, Andreessen was considered one of the poster boys of the internet economy, and some may have even thought that he created the internet the reason is because he founded a company called Netscape. And today, that name might not mean much, but it does if you remember this sound,

and if that's your first time hearing it, then just be thankful that you don't have to listen to that every time you connect to Wi Fi. Anyways, Netscape was an early internet browser, and it made the internet a lot easier for non techies to access, paving the way for the modern website

Speaker 1 3:06
and like that was legitimately a very exciting thing for a lot of people, me included, connected us to a lot of things we hadn't had access to before. It really opened up the internet for people, it felt like it was something that was legitimately, you know, a step forward, and people were super excited about it, particularly because this was a tiny startup. It wasn't an entrenched power.

Arjun Singh 3:26
But in 1999 The same year, Andreessen was calling into Bill Clinton's webcast, he sold Netscape, becoming a billionaire and transforming him from an underdog startup founder into one of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors.

Speaker 1 3:39
And you know, you look at all these years later, he is the entrenched power, and he doesn't understand why he's being covered as the entrenched power, because he still thinks of himself as like the Netscape guy through his

Arjun Singh 3:51
venture capital firm a 16 Z, Andreessen invested in companies like Facebook, Lyft and Airbnb in 2023 he invested in Musk Space X and as Andreessen net worth has grown, so have his expectations that government officials should hold the door open for him.

Speaker 1 4:07
Last summer, where he announced that he was backing Trump, one of the things that he was complaining about was that the Biden administration wouldn't meet with him as much as he wanted. And he talked about how he'd met with the Clinton administration, and he'd worked with the Bush administration, and he'd worked with the Obama administration, and it was like, Okay, this guy is really, actually very used to having access to these people who are very much in power. And his complaint, among other things, is that he doesn't have as much access anymore.

Arjun Singh 4:35
Last year, Andreessen made a big bet on Donald Trump, and like Elon Musk, he opened up his coffers to fund Trump's campaign. One of the reasons he did so is because he says he didn't have enough influence within the Biden administration.

Speaker 2 4:48
Then when you leave a meeting like that, what do you do? You go endorse Donald Trump.

Arjun Singh 4:54
In addition to access, Andreessen also wants to get rich off of crypto, and he said a big part of his. Support for Trump was because of the Biden administration's oversight of the industry.

Speaker 1 5:03
One of the things that happened during the Biden administration was that Gary Gensler, who was the head of the SEC, beefed up crypto enforcement quite a lot. And if you are a big booster of crypto, and you have invested heavily in crypto, as Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have, this sucks for your investments. And so I think there is a certain amount of self interest here, more than anything, where they're saying, Oh, well, you know, this is really, really important for society, and we're suppressing crypto, and it's really bad for my bottom line. And

Arjun Singh 5:38
Andreessen bet on Trump could stand to make him not just a wealthier person, but one of the more dominant figures in the American

Speaker 1 5:45
economy. So one of the big things that I'm keeping an eye on, and that I think people should be keeping an eye on, is the Defense Department, and it's because the VC class has invested a lot of money in defense tech. And, you know, I don't have any particular feelings about whether Lockheed Martin is a great defense contractor or not, but what I do know is that there are a lot of startups that are sort of hoping to eat Lockheed Martin's lunch. And one of the things that we've heard from the Washington Post is that there are a number of people in the defense area that are being interviewed and hand picked by Mark Andreessen, who has invested in a lot of defense tech companies at Trump's

Arjun Singh 6:23
inauguration, some viewers were struck by the image of the country's biggest techie sitting with Trump as he was sworn in to be the 47th president, putting aside the personal politics of the individuals, they all shared something in common. Each represented a major technology company that was being investigated or sued by the federal government. Take Mark Zuckerberg, for example. In the last year, Zuckerberg began to talk more about the presidential election, and notably dropped praise for Donald Trump in the heat of the campaign. Yeah.

Speaker 3 6:52
I mean, seeing Donald Trump get get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life.

Arjun Singh 7:04
And after Trump won, Zuckerberg let loose on regulatory agencies suggesting that meta was only being investigated for political reasons.

Speaker 4 7:12
And then there's like the underlying political motivation, which is like, why do the people who are running this thing hate you? And we had organizations that were looking into us that were like, not really involved with social media, like the CFPB, that agency Zuckerberg

Arjun Singh 7:27
mentioned is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and during the Biden administration, the CFPB was investigating allegations that meta improperly used financial data from third party vendors, and that they'd also launched an inquiry into how companies like meta use payment information users provided to them. Like Zuckerberg Andreessen also had a bone to pick with the CFPB, and he went to the same place to voice his frustration Joe Rogan's podcast. This

Speaker 2 7:54
is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It's like we just can't We can't live in this world. We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing, and then they literally, like, get sanctioned, right, and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable No, by the way, no due process.

Arjun Singh 8:16
But what Andreessen didn't mention in that interview is that the CFPB successfully sued a startup Andreessen had invested in for deceptive marketing and lying to their customers?

Speaker 5 8:26
Well, I think financially castigating someone cutting them off from paying their groceries or their rent, is really an extreme type of punishment, and we've seen it. We know that banks algorithmically, are closing accounts all the time, and I've always had a big problem that we see banks opening fake accounts and closing real accounts when they should be doing exactly the opposite. This

Arjun Singh 9:02
is Rohit Chopra, and up until February, he was the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau appointed in 2021 by Joe Biden. Chopra is ostensibly who Andreessen was directing his rage against when he railed against the CFPB.

Speaker 5 9:16
I think that it is not appropriate to cut someone off from the banking system because of their religion, because of their speech, their race, when we put into place some policy guidance that said this could run afoul of long standing prohibitions on unfair, deceptive consumer practices, here's what we saw. What we saw was that the bank lobby and the Chamber of Commerce, which of course, represents the big tech companies, they took the CFPB and meet a court about it, we tried another approach, which was we proposed a rule to specifically prohibit the. That kind of de banking based on, again, religion, speech, and it was crickets from those banks, crickets from those big tech companies.

Arjun Singh 10:12
And I asked Chopra about Zuckerberg too. Why was the CFPB interested in how Facebook used financial data? One reason is because tech firms like Apple, Google and even Facebook are rapidly moving into the payment space and to Chopra that presents major opportunities for digital surveillance. You

Speaker 5 10:30
know, I really have been seeing that the US has been lurching toward a more Chinese style surveillance and financial system in China, you see that there are two massive tech companies really being able to ingest all the payments and transactions that are occurring throughout the Chinese economy. And I think where we are creeping toward is that big firms are going to know almost our entire transaction history and being able to understand what is our willingness to pay dynamically.

Arjun Singh 11:14
Digital surveillance isn't limited to just tracking us wherever we go. What makes big tech even more powerful is that the top five firms, Amazon, Google, Apple, meta and Microsoft now own technology that has so many touch points with our lives, it's not hyperbolic to say that they can run our society. Here's one interesting thought experiment for you. Take Apple's iPhone in 2023 Apple controlled more than 50% of the smartphone market here in the US, I bet a good amount of you listening right now are listing on an iPhone. So consider this. Think about how many people in America rely on their iPhones or Apple watches. Last weekend, most states in America changed their clocks because of daylight savings, what's known as the spring forward. But what if Apple didn't What if Tim Cook Apple CEO decided the company didn't want to acknowledge daylight savings time? What would be the impact on society? Like I said, it sounds like a silly idea, but how many of you only realized the clocks changed when you saw your phone didn't match your oven clock? I cool and Apple's market dominance recently landed them in court.

Speaker 6 12:27
Our case is focused around what we think of is really not Apple innovating for itself, but Apple imposing restrictions that prevent others from innovating. If you want access to our platform, you can't offer a certain price, or you can't tell consumers they can leave the apple universe and get it for cheaper. Or you can't design it so that you can have tap to pay transactions for your online wallet. Or you can't interoperate effectively third party messaging systems.

Arjun Singh 12:55
That's Jonathan Cantor, and from 2021 to 2024 he was the head of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, like Chopra, cantor took an active approach to regulating the big tech companies, whereas Chopra's agency, the CFPB, tried to regulate how those companies interacted with consumers. Cantor's work focused on anti competitive business practices and how firms were illegally using their market power to muscle out competition. Last March, cantor filed an 88 page lawsuit against Apple and argued that they used illegal tactics to keep users reliant on iPhones, especially by leveraging their market strength.

Speaker 6 13:30
So by that, I mean saying, Okay, if you want access to our platform, you can't offer a certain price, or you can't tell consumers they can leave the apple universe and get it for cheaper, or you can't design it so that you can have tap to pay transactions for your online wallet, or you can't interoperate effectively with with third party messaging systems. These are all technological features that are should be available today that Apple sometimes makes available for itself, but is essentially saying, by contract or by rule that other people can't do it. And when big tech companies or any big company starts imposing regulations on industry that prohibit the ability of industry to or impede the ability of industry to compete, those are the kinds of rules and regulations that are subject to antitrust scrutiny.

Arjun Singh 14:22
Cantor, along with Chopra and former FTC chair Lina Khan, belong to a public policy movement that's calling on the government and regulatory agencies to be more willing to use the law to rein in large corporations. Their argument isn't necessarily that new laws need to be passed to tackle something like big tech, but that government regulators and presidents need to be more willing to use existing law to curb their influence. That led Canada file a lawsuit against Ticketmaster for abusing its power over venues and musicians, and another against the company real page, which they accused of using algorithmic pricing to reduce competition between landlords, resulting in higher average prices for rentals in.

Speaker 6 15:02
One of the reasons why I became so concerned about big tech was that I viewed it as really the leading edge of the wedge for how our industrialized society was going to change, not unlike the steam engine or factories, you know, changed the way in which market realities functioned in the Gilded Age and gave rise to railroads and all these technological changes, some of which can be very productive and helpful, but also create new opportunities for market power and new economic realities and market realities that we have to understand. So what I think about when you think about the role of information technology, the role of AI now and the internet, it's fundamentally changed how business is done. It's whether it's consumer, tech, healthcare, agriculture, energy, it changes those market realities. And one of the guiding principles behind our work was to make sure that we were bringing anti trust enforcement back in line with market realities, which, in my view, have adjusted in a significant way over the last 20 years because the rise of technology and changes in market structure.

Arjun Singh 16:12
Chopra thinks that's what Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been trying to do with x and Facebook by taking advantage of their massive user bases. Chopra fears that Zuckerberg and musk will be able to act like a less regulated bank, including creating platforms that could place people in debt. And it was why his CFPB was increasingly coming up against both of

Speaker 5 16:32
them. It's not that the CFPB is sort of expanding into new areas, it's that these other companies are expanding into consumer finance, into payments, banking and lending. So it's hard to know if we have a situation where the biggest tech conglomerates are able to call the shots on how the economy works. I think that we are. It's a real Jump ball to know what direction we're going to head.

Speaker 1 17:07
When you go from being like a tiny startup to being a power that is arguably on par with many governments, the way that people approach you, the way that people expect things from you, that changes. And I think for these guys, they haven't totally reckoned with the way that Tech has changed in society and the way that their roles have changed in society. And so they do probably feel a lot of resentment. They do feel that they're being unfairly attacked. They do feel that like, you know, when somebody brings up, like, Facebook's role in a genocide, that that's not something, that that's their problem, that's not something that they should have to think about, because they built this great thing, you know? So I don't, I don't know that. I think it's narcissism or a Messiah Complex, so much as I think it's an inability to reckon with the the way that Tech has changed our society, and what our expectations are of tech in our society. As a result,

Arjun Singh 18:05
that change has been felt viscerally by workers around the world. In addition to being able to surveil its users, big tech firms have found new and novel ways to surveil employees. After the break, I'll sit down with a current member of the FTC to discuss how Amazon has deployed surveillance technology to crack down on its own workforce. You

one thing that the right wing tech elite seems to believe is that workers absolutely cannot be trusted right now, that spirit's manifesting itself in Elon Musk and Donald Trump's purge of the federal government. The two believe federal workers are ripping off the government by getting to work from home, and the best way to monitor them would be to have them sitting in an office. It's the same argument Marky Andreessen made to Joe Rogan when he sat down with him a few months ago. And, you

Speaker 2 19:10
know, in theory, they're working from home, but like, you know, like, is it? Is it actually happening so? And this is why, again, this is the dose. Is one of the things that the doge they've already announced. The thing they've said is you can work from home, just not for the

Arjun Singh 19:21
federal government, being the techie that he is. Andreessen went on to explain that one way to clamp down on this allegedly recalcitrant workforce was to use digital tools to monitor people. Now,

Speaker 2 19:32
it turns out there are way there. Actually, there are ways to figure this out. So for example, for many, for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access like to email. You can actually like VPNs to get into the corporate network. You can actually audit and you can see who's been working. I think a

Speaker 7 19:47
lot of people think this technology actually increases productivity. It helps you will do more with less. I think a lot of people think that it provides some kind of ground truth and baseline reality, that both will help both. Employers and employees and the React. The uncomfortable reality is, if you talk to a truck driver, if you talk to a warehouse worker, if you talk to a call center worker, they will tell you that often, none of those things are true.

Arjun Singh 20:14
This is Alvaro Bedoya, a current commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Bedoya was appointed to do a seat in 2022 and worked alongside Charlena Khan when the FTC took big action against big tech.

Speaker 7 20:25
I don't know about you, but, like, I actually really like paper, and so I like to print stuff out and then stare at it on paper and circle stuff and underline it. But all of that in a lot of this performance monitoring software is not counted. I mean, the software will literally take 10 minute interval snapshots of your desktop and of you to see if you are, quote, unquote, working. I think a lot of it comes from this pernicious idea that everything can be measured. Everything can be quantified. COVID had a lot to do with it. Managers felt powerless, and so they bought into this idea, and they bought into the technology. Instead,

Arjun Singh 21:02
Bedoya argues that workplace surveillance technology is just making the quality of life worse for workers and even putting them in physical danger. And that echoes reports from workers in Amazon warehouses, which routinely deploy this kind of technology. What is

Speaker 7 21:17
described in any number of reports is a system that prioritizes speed above all else, and so workers are tracked down to the millisecond between how long it takes them to take something off of a conveyor belt and put it in the right Cubby, right and not only are they personally tracked, they are compared, often in real Time, often daily, but at least weekly, in terms of how they stack up to their co workers. And there's people kind of roaming around the warehouse with laptops or other devices and hand saying, speed up. You got to go quicker. But it's not just this, this persistence on speed. There's also all this technology that will do something like you know, if your job is to pick something out of a certain set of cubbies, that it will light up the next cubby that you need to turn to. And you might say, that sounds helpful, that sounds good. But what it also does is take away that brief moment where you have to breathe before you pick that next item. And so what a lot of warehouse workers report is even those tiny, little micro rests are taken away. And what you see are injury rates going through the roof. People literally their hands stop working their shoulders stop working their backs are literally broken in

Arjun Singh 22:38
January of 2023 one former Amazon warehouse worker testified in front of the Minnesota State Legislature. In her testimony, Callie Yama explained what this kind of surveillance looked like on the ground. So

Speaker 8 22:49
like the lady said, Most of the injuries come from that speed. Few not on a certain speed. The manager will come and talk to you. If you still not on that speed that they want you to be they'll come and talk to you the second time, the third time you get right up on

Arjun Singh 23:03
top of that, she said that workers were effectively governed by the whims of an internal app that would track them and even be used to fire them, locking them out of their workplaces instantly, with no ability for recourse,

Speaker 8 23:15
you're fired through an app you don't even know. No one tells you anything. You come to work, you can't get in because you already been fired, because your rates been low, and sometimes the workload, it's crazy when you work 10 hours shift four days. And recently, we had to work 12 hours five days, whether we like it or not,

Arjun Singh 23:37
even though this technology claims to help workers become more productive. In a lot of cases, they lean into extreme micromanagement, often docking workers for harmless issues that wouldn't even be a problem in the workplace. One striking example Bedoya mentioned is how surveillance Tech has changed. Call Centers and customer service. The

Speaker 7 23:56
average call center worker is subject to not one, not two, but five forms of surveillance, it is not just the timing, but the tone and the cadence the words they use, the emotion in their voice is tracked, and that's just the surveillance. There's also a little bug in their ear telling them what to say, generated by AI, and so if they use the word horrible, if they use the word terrible, they are docked for it, because those are negative words, right? And if they don't persistently sound positive, even if they're just empathizing for something terrible that happened to you, they get docked for

Arjun Singh 24:33
it. To address this, Bedoya is adamant about his belief that workers need stronger protections, including being able to unionize more easily, but similar to canter and Chopra, he thinks that existing antitrust law can address the overreach of technology in the workplace. Let's say

Speaker 7 24:47
you've got a town and there's two hospitals in it, right? You're a nurse practitioner, you're a nurse. You are an x ray technician. You are one of the any number of staff that's trained in the very specific. Specific processes of a hospital, you got two employers who compete for your labor, right? If those two hospitals merge, what's going to happen to your wages? What's going to happen to the quality of work that you have to do? You don't need to be a rocket scientist, let alone an economist, to understand that wages are probably going to go down in that you know, two hospital now, one hospital town, the quality of your work is probably going to go down yet. Antitrust enforcers for like, 100 years have basically never stopped that kind of merger because of what it would do to those quote, unquote labor markets. And so what started under the final years of the Trump administration, and what start in what expanded dramatically under chair Khan, under Jonathan Cantor at the DOJ, was a recognition that, hey, this isn't some side project of antitrust. This is core to what we're doing.

Arjun Singh 26:01
For a long time, I always thought that tech moved too rapidly for the government to catch up to it. That oft repeated phrase in Silicon Valley, move fast and break things was also a strategy to move so fast that they ensnared users before people even realized how embedded into our lives these firms really are. Now Trump's overt love for people like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk certainly leaves me skeptical about his interest in actually tackling their influence. But for a long time, these billionaires were also on the Democratic side of the bench, and under both the Trump and Biden administrations, regulators like Bedoya were trying to curb their influence. Recently, the Trump administration said it would continue to pursue antitrust cases against Microsoft and Google, and many I've spoken to who work in the antitrust space say there is reason to believe Trump may push to check the influence of big tech, and it might be because he has no choice. Tech is so ever present in our lives that it is inevitably going to come into a collision course with regulation, and if it doesn't, it may lead to a wholesale handover of the governance of our society to a click of tech companies.

Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me, Arjun Singh, with help from Chris Walker and editing support from Lucy Dean Stockton and Joel Warner, our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with another episode of lever time you

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