In the month since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the fate of Big Tech has been debated and dissected: Would he crack down on an industry he vowed revenge on for allegedly censoring right-wing content, or would he unleash them after they wooed him with millions of dollars in donations and complaints in the days leading up to and including his inauguration?
Trump and his appointees to the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department’s antitrust division are sending mixed messages.
It isn’t clear, says Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, senior analyst of digital advertising and media at eMarketer.
“This is a quid pro quo administration, and there is an element of unpredictability,” Mitchell-Wolf said in an interview. “Specific issues and policies can change on a dime” based on how tech leaders and policy makers interact with the president, she said.
Merger guidelines adopted in December 2023 by the FTC and the Antitrust Division offer a litmus test on whether the Trump administration will continue with strict enforcement.
“In [a memo to FTC staff], FTC chair Andrew Ferguson said maintaining consistent standards for merger reviews is key for the business and legal community. ‘If merger guidelines change with every new administration, they will become largely worthless to businesses and the courts,’ he wrote. ‘No business can plan for the future on the basis of guidelines they know are one election away from rescission, and no court will rely on guidance that is so obviously partisan,'” according to a Bloomberg report.
Of course, it isn’t a stretch to foresee Ferguson, a Trump loyalist, abruptly reversing course on the 2023 Merger Guidelines at the behest of the mercurial president.
“One former FTC [official] described Ferguson as a savvy political operator who will likely align with the whims of the President: ‘He has structured everything so that he can pivot in whatever direction the big man [Trump] wants to pivot,'” says a Digiday report.
“As someone who worked on the previous AI Executive Order [under then-President Joe Biden] in 2023, I think Trump’s accomplishment in focusing on rescinding the order, and instead of AI Safety focusing on AI enablement, takes notice of the AI arms race that we are currently in with our foreign adversaries,” Chris Mattmann, chief data and AI officer at UCLA, said in a message. “I am actually supportive of the rescinding of the order, and the work that [AI czar] David Sacks and his team are doing.”
Trump’s unpredictable nature has only complicated matters. While schmoozing with tech CEOs such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet Inc.’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos, Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook and Microsoft Corp.’s Satya Nadella, he hasn’t entirely granted them a free pass. In fact, he has seemingly leveraged the threat of tariffs to gain promises of U.S. manufacturing projects from Apple ($500 billion over four years), OpenAI/Oracle Corp./SoftBank ($500 billion Stargate project) and Meta (the world’s longest undersea cable to expand high-speed internet access globally).
About the only predictable thing that tech leaders can expect from Trump, though, is unpredictability.
“With this carrot approach, [Trump] appears to be getting what he wants in terms of tech companies scaling back their content moderation programs,” Robert Kuykendall, director of accounts at Proven Media Solutions, said in an email. “Simply put, he’s adopted a stance that signals a role for the federal government in facilitating industry growth while also being the referee that ensures these companies treat consumers fairly.”
As president in 2020, Trump tried to ban TikTok with an Executive Order. Now, he’s fighting the ban enacted by Congress in 2024.
In December, when he named Gail Slater as his pick to lead the DoJ’s antitrust division, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”
By January, however, he had announced a raft of big-money projects and initiatives with Big Tech to build out artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure over the next several years.
The flashiest, Stargate, breathlessly boasted of up to $500 billion in funding to build massive data centers in the U.S. with OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft Corp., and SoftBank as partners. [Presidential adviser Elon Musk is an avowed enemy of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and a vocal skeptic of Stargate, adding a layer of tension and intrigue.]
Still, wholesale evisceration of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a crucial component of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for cybersecurity and infrastructure protection across all levels of government, has sent waves of concern among security professionals.
More alarms were set on Tuesday, when a group of 21 tech workers in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) abruptly quit, claiming in a letter they will not use their skills to “dismantle critical public services.”
“The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to cancelling or disbanding orders with bipartisan support with little to no commentary nor a chance to debate,” Alexander Garcia-Tobar, CEO and co-founder of Valimail, said in an email. “What follows is unknown and there is great consternation that this is happening at exactly the same time we are seeing security threats escalate.”
