Kamala Harris, who is Biden’s deputy and what she will do with Big Tech
The next US Vice President, Kamala Harris, has deep personal and financial ties to Silicon Valley, but some observers believe that …
We did it, @JoeBiden . pic.twitter.com/oCgeylsjB4
– Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 7, 2020
Senator Kamala Harris will be the Vice President of the White House with Joe Biden, but what relationship will she have with Silicon Valley? It is one of the issues at the center of the debate in the United States between politics and economics.
HARRIS'S RELATIONSHIPS WITH BIG TECH
Harris has always viewed Big Tech as a partner rather than a threat, and has taken a moderate tone towards the industry on several fronts, most analysts argue. As a presidential candidate, Harris did not claim to 'break up' with Facebook, Google's parent company Alphabet, or Amazon, as Senator Elizabeth Warren and fellow Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders did, but she was willing. instead, to strengthen the application of antitrust rules. Like Biden, she recently called for a corporate tax hike, but then stopped before supporting a tax on assets held by wealthier Americans, Marketwatch writes.
MANY ALLIES AND FRIENDS IN THE SILICON VALLEY
“Usually the vice president doesn't manage a president's technical agenda, but he can still help set the tone for a wide range of issues for a presidential campaign and administration. Harris's familiarity with these companies could give it a major role in technology policy, ”said Axios' Kyle Daly and Ashley.
Harris has many friends and allies in Silicon Valley, even among Big Tech billionaires. For example, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg posted a photo of Harris on Instagram within minutes of Biden's announcement, hailing his selection as a "great moment for black women and girls around the world."
Sales chief executive Marc Benioff, Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky and then Apple executives Marissa Mayer and Jony Ive were among the big names in fundraising for his 2014 re-election nomination as attorney general of California, Recode's Teddy Schleifer noted on Twitter.
THE PRESSURES ON BIG TECH
However, both as a prosecutor and as a senator, Harris has also put pressure on Big Tech.
"Technology companies need to be regulated in a way that we can guarantee, and the American consumer can rest assured that their privacy has not been compromised," Harris told The New York Times . She was evasive, however, when asked if the tech giants should be fragmented.
Harris has been lobbying online platforms in a fight against revenge porn, as reported on Politico.com .
And he backed the 2018 bill that reduced the tech industry's liability shield, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. He told CNN he would "closely follow" Facebook's 'fragmentation'. Finally, by putting pressure on disinformation platforms, foreign meddling, and hate speech, it made tech CEOs on Capitol Hill tremble.
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EXTRACT FROM THE ARTICLE BY DANIELE RAINERI FOR THE SHEET DATED AUGUST 2020
In January 2019, a law professor from San Francisco, Lara Bazelon, wrote a devastating op-ed in the New York Times against Kamala Harris, who was then running in the primary to become president. The editorial shattered the image Kamala Harris loved to give of himself, that of the "progressive prosecutor." Inserted into the mechanism of the law, but with her own ideas that helped make the system better and more humane.
Bazelon wrote instead that Harris is by no means progressive, and brought up a series of arguments not without a certain rancor: he did not oppose the death penalty, he had not tried to remedy blatant procedural errors that kept innocent people in jail and every time. that it was time to make a choice of progressive politics, he abstained – particularly on a law that allowed the parents of students who skipped school to be punished even with imprisonment. The charge was: Harris is not an antisystem heroine, she is part of the system and approves of its worst aspects. That single article then became the mother of all left-wing criticism of Kamala Harris, summed up in the slogan: Kamala is a cop. Kamala is a policeman.
Stuff that sounded bad for a sector of Democratic voters in 2019, let alone now in 2020 as the country is split by the killing of George Floyd in front of passersby's phones on a Minneapolis sidewalk.
Balancing in that role of black attorney, first district and then state, in California – the nation's most liberal-minded state, but also a fifty million-strong state and metropolis like Los Angeles – was difficult for Harris. During her first campaign, to become a prosecutor in San Francisco, she was seen as very leftist, one who wasn't afraid to confront the cops if she thought they'd done something wrong. But then there was a turning point, which explains his flattening as a prosecutor in the following years.
The turning point is April 10, 2004. A 29-year-old plainclothes policeman, Isaac Espinoza, during an overtime shift, when he was supposed to be already at home, sees a suspect, tries to stop him, he turns around, hand a Kalashnikov assault rifle, fires a burst and kills him. Espinoza had a wife and a four-year-old daughter, he is the first policeman killed in service in ten years, the murder garnered enormous attention.
Over the next several years Harris will become very cautious when it comes to taking sides. And often it will change it. In his 2009 book he writes that it would take more police on the streets because all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see more officers, but this year he told the New York Times that wanting more policemen on the streets is a status thing. quo, very wrong.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/kamala-harris-chi-e-la-vice-di-biden-e-cosa-fara-con-le-big-tech/ on Sat, 07 Nov 2020 18:37:25 +0000.