Tech Regulation's Crucial Year — With Sen. Mark Warner

Senator Mark Warner takes us inside the battle to regulate Big Tech. Elected in 2008 and serving his third term in the U. S. Senate, Sen. Warner joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether we should regulate Big Tech and how the companies are fighting back — overtly and covertly. Ahead of the midterm elections, this year is crucial. In the second half, we also discuss whether members of Congress should trade individual stocks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversations of the tech world and beyond. While you're all in for a treat today, we're nearing what everyone is calling crunch time for the big tech antitrust bills. And, you know, we want to get a look at what's happening inside Washington right now when it comes to big tech and the way that Congress views these companies. And who better to do it than Senator Mark Warner? He joins us today from his office in Washington. It's been a heck of a start to the year, lots of stuff going on. Senator Warner, welcome to the show.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Alex, thanks so much. Yeah, it's, uh, it's hard to imagine that it's only, um, January 10th.

• 1:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was just looking back at what was happening last year. And like, week one was the Capitol riot. Week two was impeachment. Week three was the inauguration. And week four was the GameStop rebellion in the stock market. It's just like, that was such a crazy month. And it feels like, um, things haven't really slowed down. It just keeps getting, you know, more and more intense.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  It, it, it does. I mean, we've obviously got And part of this is due to Congress's fault of inability to kind of get our act together. But, you know, the current things, at least in the Senate, are how do we put forward a bill to protect voting rights, as we've seen state after state restrict voting rights and frankly, even go to the point of saying certification of elections, let's turn that over to a partisan body. That's wacky in my mind. And then we are still struggling on the second half of the president's agenda, the so-called Build Back Better, you know, as somebody who was very involved in the infrastructure bill, that was a, I think, a home run for the country. Glad it was bipartisan. The second half has proven to be a little more challenging.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  And I'm trying to work with my friend Joe Manchin to see if we can figure out a way to get the yes on at least some version of that.

• 3:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And it's amazing that even still, there's room for tech stuff. And that's kind of where we want to take this conversation. And I think there's two main questions here. One is the advisability of regulating these companies and how you do it. And then the second one, I think that's, you know, super important. We'll get to it in the second section, is what's stopping anything from going through? You personally introduced legislation in 2017. And, you know, we'll talk about that in the second segment. I want to hear what's happening with it. But why don't we start with the advisability of regulating these companies? So, yeah, go ahead.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  No, just for your listeners, my background was I was in the tech field for 20 years. I was longer in the tech field than I've been in the political field. And, you know, I think for a long time, both political parties, starting roughly early 2000s, became such techno-optimists. You know, traditionally, Republicans have been less regulatory, the Democrats, particularly under Obama, you know, we were all got enthralled with the power of these social media platforms. And the kind of, you know, Silicon Valley mantra of break things and figure out stuff later, you know, served these platforms well. But

• 4:30Speaker 01

  I think we now have this holy heck kind of moment of, gosh, unlimited power to these platforms, which have as much power as any company in

• 4:42Speaker 01

  In history, I mean, I think if you think back to the 20th century analogy of the the major trusts, the railroads and some of the banks and so the steel manufacturers who had huge power, that power is actually small compared to the power that Facebook or Google or Amazon had. So I do think there is a recognition, and I say this again as somebody who's a venture capitalist, regulation per se is not going to stymie these innovations, it's not going to stymie,

• 5:17Speaker 01

  stymie, I think, new discovery. We do need some guardrails because while Congress is abysmally behind, I mean, as you mentioned, I put my first kind of low hanging fruit bipartisan tech regulatory bill in place about five years ago, the fact that it's still not been acted on, that bill was called the Honest Ads Act, which would simply said you ought to have the same disclosure requirements for political ads on the internet as you have on TV and radio, not exactly a huge leap, but we still haven't been able to move on it, although most of the Facebooks at all have actually self enforced that. But this idea that you're going to have a light touch regulatory, which in terms

• 5:59Speaker 01

  of tech is meant a no touch, or we're going to give the platforms the ability to self-regulate, I just don't think is is cutting it. And, you know, while I'm critical of Congress, I would also point out that other than privacy legislation, which our European friends have done, and obviously California, and we've done a variation of this in Virginia and certain other states, in terms of content regulation, or data interoperability, or knowing the valuation of the information that you're that you are giving up to these platform companies, all legislation I've I've put in place, it's pretty interesting to me that Even the EU or the UK or some of our friends in Asia, none of them have been that

• 6:42Speaker 01

  successful as well as putting up some kind of regulatory framework. I think from a kind of a big picture standpoint, for so many years, the rest of the world kind of relied on America setting the framework, regulatory framework around technology as we made so many innovations came out of our country, even if we didn't innovate, we got to set the rules, procedures, protocols, standards. You know, I could take you industry after industry, how that's been the case, but our failure to act has, I think, has serious long-term negative repercussions for us, but it's also shown that the rest of the world hasn't been able to act as well.

• 7:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and the stats that I was gonna read out, talk about like how important these companies are to the American economy. So here's one, in 2015, Amazon employed around 230,000 people, now it's over a million. For Apple, it took more than four decades to reach trillion dollar status, two more years after that to hit two trillion, and about 17 months after that to hit three trillion. There's a lot of talk, you know, in the tech world that Congress acting to restrain these companies is going to kill like one of the good things about the American economy, something that is increasing people's retirement portfolios, you know, the Apple example, and employing lots of Americans.

• 8:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  How worried are you about messing with that success? And I know there's good reason to come in and try to restrain these companies, but I'm curious how much of your calculation is about, is take that into account, especially given your experience working in tech yourself?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Well, all these companies have a global footprint, and I am kind of macro picture concerned that if we completely...

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Disable these mostly American-based enterprises that they would simply be replaced by, you know, Baidu and Tencent and Alibaba. You know, there are Chinese-type equivalents who have even less restraints on them, who collect even more information. All that information is shared with the Communist Party in China. And when I mention China, let me clear my beef is with the CCP. It's not with the Chinese people or Chinese-Americans. And I think we have to draw that distinction. But, you know, we've seen that tech world in China, in collaboration with the Communist Party, create a surveillance state that would make Orwell blush. So the, yes, we have to be careful about what happens. We don't want to turn off the American companies and cede

• 9:16Speaker 01

  the field to the Chinese. But the notion that, you know, what these companies unbounded are able to do in collaboration with their government is a pretty scary notion. And it directly, it directly is counter to kind of American or Western ideas about liberty, or transparency, or freedom, or privacy. So while I'm concerned about the China's Chinese companies filling the gap, it's not enough then to say there's not, it shouldn't be some guardrails. And where are those guardrails? I would argue they fall into three or four buckets. Let me very quickly go

• 9:55Speaker 01

  through this. First, there are whole questions around privacy. And it's, and it's crazy that we have not put a, an equivalent of GDPR here in, in America, you know. And, and there's basic agreement. The only thing that's holding up a national privacy bill, in my mind, is who gets the right to sue, you know, this private right of action versus Attorney Generals if there are violations of that privacy, you know. I think that should be resolved, but but it's again, it's a sad state of affairs that we've not put some privacy requirements in place and that clearly does not will not undermine

• 10:34Speaker 01

  the the ability of these platforms to do well. The second would be the areas where I call pro competition, because I do think we have way too much concentration. And while I celebrate Apple's three trillion and we're very proud in Virginia to get Amazon second headquarters, and these these companies have power that is I've never seen in my lifetime. And again, I would say even Trump, what happened in the beginning of the 20th century when before the Roosevelt and the so-called trustbusters come about, you know, and what would those pro competition bills look like? Well, one would be data portability and interoperability. If you get tired of the way Facebook treats you, you ought to be able to easily move you all of your data to a new site, the same way for as an old telecom guy, number portability took

• 11:19Speaker 01

  place, and then still be able to, as you move to new co, still talk to your friends on Facebook in an interoperable way. That would be a very pro competition standard. I think as well, the idea that we ought to know what our data is worth. I think there's nothing morally wrong with Facebook or Google sucking information out of us and then marketing that. But as you know, we ought to realize we are, we are the product, not really customers of these platforms. And having us become at least knowledgeable products that we know my data is worth X and yours, Alex, is worth Y, that would be a good, a good piece of information for a more transparent market. Third would be, there are certain things like so-called dark

• 12:03Speaker 01

  patterns, and this is a rare place where I can talk about these kinds of things, that your audience would understand it, the kind of manipulative tools that these platforms use oftentimes to not let you see another view or not exit off of of a service, we ought to prohibit those. So I would call those areas around around pro competition. How can we, you

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Non-antitrust, but simply put more competition into the marketplace. The third area, privacy, competition, the third is content regulation. This goes to the heart of Section 230. Section 230 in the late 90s, which gave these platforms total immunity, made sense maybe at that point. But as these companies now are the biggest in the world, for them to be able, no matter what kind of violation takes place on their platform, to suddenly say Section 230 is this blanket of immunity, doesn't make any sense. And there are approaches that others have got that says, let's look at the algorithms, let's look at bias. My approach is saying, well, let's at least say whether it's civil rights discriminations

• 13:07Speaker 01

  or providing injunctive relief or not giving total protection to advertising, we'll still give you the free speech right to say stupid stuff over the internet and not be penalized for that. But I'm not sure that right expands to having it then amplified five billion times, but let's take actions that are otherwise illegal and say Section 230 does not give you a blanket set of immunity. Would still mean you still have to prove the case. You still have to go to a court and get an injunctive relief or demonstrate that there is a civil rights violation. But I think that around content moderation that protects First Amendment is a third area. And then the final area are the whole host of antitrust bills that go from full breakup

• 13:51Speaker 01

  to questions that say simply some of these platforms shouldn't be able to favor their own products over other products. And in that area, there is some bipartisan agreement. Chuck Grassley, my friend Amy Klobuchar's got a bill. Yeah, I'm a co-sponsor. It needs some work. It's not perfect by any means, but that would be the fourth category. So, you know, let's again, privacy, pro-competition, content slash 230 modification, or antitrust breakup are the four areas of regulation. And I think, you know, we will see action in one or two of those areas this year in 2022. The one thing that particularly Facebook's managed to do, which is kind of hard to do, is they have created a bipartisan consensus where Democrats and Republicans actually agree on something.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And that is that the current status quo with Facebook just doesn't work.

• 14:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and so the thing that the one that's most advanced of those four categories are those antitrust bills that are actually antitrust bills that are out there. And again, as I mentioned at the top, it looks like by August, we're either going to know whether they're going to go forward or not. But you know, it's interesting because you look at some like the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would prevent some of these companies from using data that they acquire from people that have to go through them to compete with those other small businesses. Or the Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, that's one that is going to limit companies' abilities to acquire smaller companies. And when I think about these, I do wonder what's the standard that the government needs to use or Congress needs to use when it comes to passing legislation?

• 15:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because the question is, do we wonder about protecting the consumer? Some of the things that you were talking about, privacy regulation, they focus on the individual. Whereas like some of these bills focus on promoting competition between companies and typically in a capitalist system, you let the market figure it out. So do you think we're in the middle of a shift here where we're starting to pay more attention to the competition between business and less competition, less attention to, you know, protecting the individual? And is that a shift in the way that we look at antitrust in America right now?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Well, Alex, I'm not, I'm not sure I would draw the distinction that way. I think we do want to see a competitive marketplace where we don't have too much concentration of power. But traditionally, antitrust has been about you giving the consumer lower prices. And clearly, you know, Amazon, for example, has provided lower prices. Clearly, when you've got Facebook and Google that say they they don't even charge, quote unquote, you know, those are lower prices. But the short-term lower prices versus the longer-term implications that when...

• 16:38Speaker 01

  They have total dominance of the market, their ability then to set subsequently higher prices or ratchet up, you know, changes the kind of antitrust mindset from, you know, what's going to happen over the next 12 months to how do we have to look at this concentration of power on a five or 10 year basis. I think it is appropriate to look, look out, not just in, in terms of, of immediacy. And I do think there is both a inherent challenge when you have a market that is completely dominated by a single player. I mean, I, you know, I think in terms of, of, and I say this, you know, I respect Amazon. I'm glad they're, they're

• 17:20Speaker 01

  building, you know, their second headquarters in Northern Virginia, but their ability to take down Martica vertical after vertical, um, you know, that gives me a pause. Uh, you know, should we have a delivery system on, on grocery and food? Yes, absolutely. But should they be able to own sector after sector without, without, uh, competitive forces? Because when you've got such scale, the ability for a new entity to, to come in is dramatically undermined. As, as you know, and your audience may know, is, you know, I spent a long time as a venture capitalist, mostly in telecom, but somewhat in the IT space. And for a long time, as we grew companies, they could either grow to maturity or we could, you know, we

• 18:05Speaker 01

  could sell them to a larger player. Uh, I know at least in the IT and in the data space, you know, talk to my friends in, in, um, that are still venture capitalists, you, their only exit for many of their firms is to these large players. There is no alternative. You can't ever get to scale.

• 18:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  And, and there's no other, nobody else to sell to. So this concentration of power continues, uh, continues to expand and, and.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  And when these companies have the power, frankly, when they when they have global footprints and power in a sense to ignore national governments, I think they can't completely ignore our government. But I think Facebook has kind of blown off a variety of smaller countries views. When I think about what happened in when Facebook advanced the aims of the Burmese military doing which the Burmese military wanted to have them their people kill the Rohingya and Facebook acknowledged they did some bad stuff, but there was nobody to bring them to heel. I'm not sure that's the right thing to have going forward. I

• 19:14Speaker 01

  think about all the, you know, the science fiction movie and James Bond movies that we've all seen over the last 20 years. Usually, the bad guys are not some national country. The bad guys are usually some corporate or company that has gotten outrageous amounts of power. And not not to go over the top, but some of these companies with their power may not be bound by any rules or regulations. And that's again, why I think at least putting some guardrails in place, not stifling innovation, but actually promoting more innovation. So that there can be people that can, you know, take these companies down a page or two in the marketplace would actually would actually be productive.

• 19:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Senator Mark Warner is here. We've talked in the first segment about the advisability of regulating big tech companies. I think there's some really good arguments to explore legislation and we might see some pass in the United States. The thing that I find especially fascinating is why we haven't seen anything happen yet. We've had a lot of hearings, nothing passed. Let's get to that in the second segment. We'll be back right after this.

• 20:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 22:11Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 22:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back for the second segment here with Senator Mark Warner on the Big Technology Podcast. We talked a lot about the potential for regulation and why it might be advisable when it comes to big tech companies. And certainly, we may see some movement in the next couple of months. But I want to know why we haven't seen much up till now. And Senator Warner, with all due respect, I feel like we keep seeing, you know, hearing after hearing of senators calling in these big tech company executives. We just saw it happen with Instagram after the revelations from Francis Haugen. And I wonder if the Senate's going to start to lose some credibility on this stuff because, you know, you can only bring these executives and scold them so much if nothing actually happens. And it doesn't seem like anything's happened now. Is that a concern for you as well? And why haven't we seen any movement?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely, it's a concern. And let me...

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Let me give you, I think, three reasons why we've not seen action. First, and we talked about this a bit in the first segment, these companies are kind of our national heroes in terms of innovation and, you know, obviously have huge global footprints. And I believe for a while, both political parties were so enamored with the possibilities, the upsides. We became enamored with this idea that technology was going to increase people's power, independence, what have you. And, you know, and couple that with the traditional Republican opposition to regulation and

• 23:53Speaker 01

  the love affair between the Obama administration and big tech. And you had for a while where we only saw the upside of these companies and didn't see the downside. In many ways, I think the beginnings of seeing the downside was the Russian manipulation of Facebook in terms of their interference in our 2016 election, when there was like this holy crap moment. Yes, there's good things, but with these, this huge social media network, there is a dark underbelly. But it took a while when both political parties were kind of, were kind of enamored with big tech.

• 24:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just to quickly jump in there, I mean, it does seem like the Democrats were thrilled about using data to advertise on social media, but then they lost and all of a sudden turned against it.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yes, but I think there was also, I think, none of us, and I'll put myself in this position, failed to understand how Facebook was being manipulated by Russian agents, you know, in a way to try to skew the elections. And I can still remember very distinctly when, you know, as, again, I saw this from being on the Intelligence Committee, where shortly after the elections in November, you know, of 2016, and I said, I thought this was going on. And Zuckerberg famously said, you know, any, I'm paraphrasing here, any politician that thought Russians were manipulating us, you know, is just ignorant. He had to eat those words and he apologized to me profusely months later when they saw

• 25:25Speaker 01

  what level of manipulation, but there was this, you know, we only saw the good side, we didn't see the downside. So that would be number one reason why we haven't moved. Number two reason is...

• 25:37Speaker 01

  A lot of my colleagues don't understand this stuff. There have been some pretty, I won't call out their names, but your audience remembers where senators would bring tech CEOs come in and, you know, vividly demonstrate that they didn't understand the technology, they didn't understand the business model, and just a, a lack of, of knowledge of how these systems worked. And consequently, when politicians are, are less aware of the specifics, they, they got uneasy. I mean, we're seeing a little bit of a duplication of that take place around the, the emerging cryptocurrency debates right now, where a lot of the folks just don't understand it. So I think there'd be ignorance as a second candidate.

• 26:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think you guys are doing better on that. I think their level of questioning has definitely gotten better in, in recent hearings, but it was kind of wild to hear senators say like, how can I send an email on WhatsApp or WhatsApp is a messaging app? Or the, how do you make money?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, or, yeah, or like, how do you not charge?

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Right, but is there some algorithm that spits out some information to your ad platform? And then, let's say I'm emailing about Black Panther within WhatsApp, do I get a WhatsApp, do I get a Black Panther banner ad?

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Senator, we don't, Facebook's systems do not see the content of messages being transferred over WhatsApp.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, but that's, that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking about whether these systems talk to each other without a human being touching it.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Senator, I think the answer to your specific question is if you message someone about Black Panther on WhatsApp, it would not inform any ads.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Well, if so, how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Senator, we run ads.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  I see.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  So I think ignorance was second. The third is, you know, under Obama, under Trump,

• 27:34Speaker 01

  You many times when we talk about concentration issues or tech regulation issues, some of it's done by Congress, but a lot of it is oftentimes done by administrative process, whether it be the SEC, the FCC, the FTC, all these alphabet agencies. And for both Obama and for Trump, the executive part of our government did squat. Now, you're seeing Biden put a lot more people particularly on the FTC, which has some of the antitrust implications in place. So the failure of the executive to actually have a position, and I still think this is where I'd be critical of Biden. You know, he's put some people in place, but you know,

• 28:18Speaker 01

  I should know this as an ally of the administration, but who's in charge of tech policy out of the White House? I don't have the foggiest idea.

• 28:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  So the failure to have

• 28:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why not?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Well, they just have not been clear on that. Now, again, this first year, they had a lot of other things on their plate with the virus and with, you know, trying to get infrastructure through and these other bills. But I think, you know, people's patience is wearing thin with the administration about when they're going to articulate a clear policy, which you can be for or against. But having the president weigh in, especially when you would talk about legislation, is terribly important. And then the final thing, and this, I guess, I've said there was three, but there is a fourth.

• 28:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, let's go with four.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  And that fourth item is these tech companies have been damn good at hiring great lobbyists.

• 29:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  You have former members of Congress, others. And what they've managed to create is not the traditional trade association. But if you follow the money in terms of who funds a whole host of new think tanks that have cool sounding names with, you know, serious scientists or serious researchers engaged with these think tanks. But frankly, they are advocates oftentimes for the big tech position. They are not the kind of independent think tanks that we sometimes look to in DC.

• 29:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we've been following the money on big technology and it is amazing to see how many institutions there are that are funded by big tech. I mean, here, let's go through some names. Progressive Policy Institute. Does that sound like a tech front group? Or does it sound like a, you know, an independent group that wants to advance democratic causes? What do you think?

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I know these groups. So I'm not, you know, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna say, most of the ones you're gonna name are going to be ones that, that, that if you follow the money, they, they may be progressive on certain points, but when it comes to protecting 230, when it comes to protecting the bailiwick of these entities, they're not independent.

• 30:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Chamber of Progress, similar stuff, right?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 30:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  It, it strikes me that we have this problem in the United States of anytime there's a big business or, you know, a big industry, they end up funding the third parties that set the agenda here. So here's, here's some examples. I pulled this off of Healthline. The American Diabetes Association gets support from Dan and Yogurt, which, you know, you would think that dairy might play into it. The American Cancer Society receives support from Tyson Foods. The Susan G. Komen Foundation receives support from Kentucky Fried Chicken and Yoplait. The American Heart Association, and this one really surprised me, receives support from the Texas Beef Council. And of course, you know, here's a classic one,

• 31:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  that Purdue Farm of funded the American Pain Society. You know, we see all these issues with, with people spreading, you know, you've highlighted it, disinformation on social media, people believing the wildest conspiracy theories. But don't you think it's a problem that, you know, we're losing trust in our institutions because so many of the conversations and the agendas are being set by, you know, the companies that they're supposed to be reining it?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yes, I think this is a

• 31:38Speaker 01

  a huge, a huge problem. And, you know, one of my colleagues, Sheldon Whitehouse, the senator from Rhode Island, has, you know, this is probably his, you know, one of his top two issues, the problems with dark money, the ramifications that came out of the Supreme Court case called Citizens United, where this kind of dark money could float not only to candidates and in their supporting organizations, but also allows a lot more hidden money to flow into organizations, as you, as you pointed out, that, where some of these funders may be actually directly counter to what the, as you mentioned, around some of these disease

• 32:22Speaker 01

  state organizations, what their mission ought to be. And, and how you, you, the,

• 32:30Speaker 01

  the incredible value that comes from the internet of being able to source lots of different voices and lots of different ideas is a tremendous upside. But it also means that we have no common sources of knowledge. And it really puts a burden, I think, on, on new citizens. I think about my kids who are in their twenties and early thirties, you know, where they have to go to find the truth is a much harder challenge than what I had when I was in my teens and twenties, where, you know, you got one version of truth that may not have been 100% accurate, but there was, you know, the three major TV networks, and, you know, old folks like me always cite, you know, the Walter Cronkite effect, you

• 33:13Speaker 01

  at least kind of thought there was some editorial, there was some fact checking and validity indicating that would come out of that. And, you know, and I do believe that, that this kind of mass of voices that were, that are coming at us now over the internet, you know, that this, this problem of misinformation, disinformation, you know, some of it does lie at the feet of Donald Trump, who, again, I've never seen anybody in public life, or for that matter, in business life, who had such a powerful position in so little regard for factual, objective truth.

• 33:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And then I guess like one of the questions is like that, you know, people start to believe lies when they don't believe that the government's going to work in their favor. So and in particular, like if it's swayed by these groups that are fronts for big business. So is there anything that you can do? Would it even be advisable? I know we have a first amendment, so we have to think about that. But is there anything that the Senate can do to start to prevent some of this dark money from flooding into these organizations?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  One of the things that we are working on trying to build into this voting rights legislation, because as I mentioned at the top of the show, a number of these number of states are trying to not only cut back on the ability to do early voting, or you know, the idea that if you're waiting 10 hours in line to vote, you know, as in Georgia, they've said, we can't give you water while you're waiting in line. You know, that is clearly an effort to try to discourage people from voting, or turning over the results not to an independent body, but to a partisan body to decide who wins on a particular county. That obscures the hell out of us. But what we

• 35:03Speaker 01

  tried to include in that legislation was a prohibition on some of these dark money rules that came out of the so-called Citizens United case. I think combining that with more transparency on the funding sources of these organizations who are advocacy groups, you know, I think Americans can then make their own decision. I'm not saying you can't fund that group, but you ought to it ought to be a lot more transparent. And there ought to be a lot more like, all right, who's behind it? And we saw this again, you know, beyond kind of corporate interest malaligned, but the number of items that still appear on the internet.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  That are being promoted, for example, by bots and trolls out of Russia or by, you know, other foreign sources to amplify messages that are frankly, one, not true and two, at their core, trying to divide us more as Americans. That is a much, remains a much, much bigger problem than I think most folks realize. And one of the things that I'm trying to get is the, is the intelligence community to be more forward leaning about sharing what we know about who the sources of some of this misinformation, who the sources are,

• 36:26Speaker 01

  because I think that would be illuminating for Americans regardless of their political stripe.

• 36:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I agree. I think we should all see that stuff. Lastly, on this topic, don't you think that members of Congress and the Senate shouldn't be trading individual stocks? We see it all the time where like, you know, if you're tasked with regulating these companies or if you even have a whiff of like what's happening, I'm not saying you in particular, but I've spoken with, you know, former members of Congress who said they know that, you know, members, they've, the new colleagues that were day trading in their offices.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I am, was very fortunate. I did, you know, I was in the wireless business. I started a company called Nextel. I, you know, then became a pretty successful venture capitalist during the 30s. So I've had the luxury that most people don't, let me acknowledge it, you know, coming into public service first as governor and then as senator. And I put all of my, my assets in a trust and we don't, you know, we don't, I don't, and that trust doesn't buy any individual stocks. Now, we've had companies that, you know, I've invested in 15 years ago that ended up going public that we, you get a stock distribution and

• 37:39Speaker 01

  then the trustee sells it quickly. So, you know, there's occasional transactions because that just, you know, the, the process that takes place when you invest in a startup. But I absolutely do believe that, that members ought to. Restrict themselves from playing in the market. There's, there is a law that's called the Stock Act, which requires you to report.

• 37:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  But it's, it's, um, it's enforcement has been a bit spotty.

• 38:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Yeah. There've been people who've just kind of totally ignored it. I think Ted Cruz was pretty late in filing some of his stuff. And of course, like elections go by and voters can't make decisions. But I wish that it wouldn't be up, it wouldn't have to come to voters deciding whether a corrupt member of Congress is going to stay or leave. It seems like you should be pretty, in pretty good shape if you're able to just buy like a total market index.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's.

• 38:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or even the S and P 500.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's again, you, you, or buy, you know, a fund that you could even be industry specific, but it needs to be a broad base where, you know, where the member doesn't have any, um, have any, you know, say, no, you know, I will get, I will have colleagues say to me, well, you know, it's easy for you to say, well, you're already rich, you know? So what means that I, if I'm a member of Congress, I can't, you know, participate in the markets. So, but I think, um, you, if you take these jobs of responsibility, you have to be willing to give up something. I do think the ability to, you know, trade and particularly on a day trade basis is just, even if you're not doing anything wrong, it looks bad.

• 39:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's crazy. And also like they could get rich just by, you know, investing their money in, if, in the broad index funds with the S and P was up more than 20% last year. That's a pretty good return for anyone.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Although again, I, I would, I, I'm not sure we can project forward the last three years of the market on a, you know, that inflation is not going to go away if we continue to compound the stock market 20% gains over the next 10 years.

• 39:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  No doubt. But I guess like to, to be more, to be more specific about it, picking individual stocks rarely, you know, beats the market unless you have an angle and members of Congress have an angle. So go with the indexes.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Well, I also think it's, you know, I've, I've always felt that, uh, you know, all these folks who come pitch my trustee or others about what better returns. Um, I think the stock pickers, you look at their, you look at their averages against the, the actual returns of the market over the last five or 10 years. And, you know, he's time and again, you know, picking, picking a market based fund. Is both cheaper and probably has a better return.

• 40:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, I, you know, I know that there's a lot of resistance, including from Nancy Pelosi, but it would be nice if there was a push in that direction somewhere in the Senate to get that done. I want to talk a little bit about your experience with the Honest Ads Act. You know, we've talked a lot about the associations, the reasons for why things get blocked. This thing came out in 2017.

• 40:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  What was, yeah, I guess like from the inside, what was it like trying to get support for it? How did the companies fight it? Do you think, and what do you think is responsible for it being stalled? Is it the agencies or?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, let me, let me, um, you know, again, start with a very short description of what this bill would, would do.

• 40:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  I appreciate you setting the context. Usually it's the guests that jump in without, and I have to set it. So.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no.

• 41:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're an amazing guest. Thank you.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  The, the, the current rules are, you know, if, if you are, and everybody's heard this, if you hear a political ad that is, um, you know, for a candidate or for a cause, you know, the candidate always says, you know, I've paid for this ad, or you have to disclose who's funding it.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  And that has been the case, whether it's a newspaper ad, a TV ad, a radio ad. What we saw in 2016 was that there were Russian groups actually

• 41:36Speaker 01

  help partially sponsored by the Russian government and some of their spy services, placing ads on Facebook and pay foring, paying for those ads in rubles. Wasn't even like they tried to hide it and paid for it in dollars or euros. And these ads would pop up on Facebook and not reveal who the source of the funder was. So we saw this.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  We said, let's do the lowest, least denominator, what should be the simplest no-brainer requirement that says if you do a political ad, you ought to have the same disclosure requirements on the internet as you have on TV and radio. The late Senator John McCain was one of the cosponsors. Amy Klobuchar, who was the chairman of the Rules Committee, was my other cosponsor. When John McCain died, Lindsey Graham became the cosponsor. Bipartisan. On this one, the challenge, and I hate to call out an individual member, but the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, has been absolutely against any type or form of campaign finance reform.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  This is just a red line for him, and quite honestly, he stopped his Republican senators from cosponsoring that. And again, it was, I guess there was a little bit of a time there that it would be at least a bit of a slap at Donald Trump, since Donald Trump was benefiting from some of these ads. So, we put forward the legislation, we thought it would pass. McConnell stopped it. And what ended up happening was Facebook then endorsed the ad, and they've said they would, you know, they would have this kind of disclosure. And they've done about 85, 90% of it.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Still, they've got an area where they categorize, and a consumer can go look at all the ads, and look at who's supposedly funded them. It's still not that easy to get at, it's not that transparent, but this is a case where, since we didn't pass legislation, the company, Facebook in particular, and YouTube to a lesser degree, you know, has self-regulated and put some of this process in place. But I actually think this is an area where Facebook would have welcomed the legislation, because, you know, people like me and others will still criticize them. If there was a law in place, they could meet that law's requirements, and, you know, if

• 44:07Speaker 01

  we didn't write the law the right way, they, you know, it would be not their foul, it would be our mistake. So I think this is one of those areas where, you know, reasonable regulation, the industry would even welcome. Let me give you another quick example of a bill that we put forward that, again, just kind of blows your mind, that...

• 44:31Speaker 01

  If you have evidence of a foreign government trying to interfere in an election, there ought to be an obligation to tell the FBI. Hmm. You would think that, you know, if you're seeing potentially a crime taking place, shouldn't there be an obligation to tell the FBI? We couldn't even get that passed. But let us, let me also say that this is, this is not just happening in, in the, the social media realm or foreign interference realm. I, I bet you don't know and, and probably your, your audience doesn't know. This is right now that if you are a critical piece of our infrastructure, if you're to say the SolarWinds firm, which, you know, had 18,000 companies and had their product critical to the supply chain.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  If you have a major breach, the way SolarWinds was attacked by the, the GRU, the Russian spy agencies, you have no obligation to tell the government. So luckily in the case of SolarWinds, they did, or luckily in the case of Colonial Pipeline, when they were hacked with ransomware, they told the government. But what you didn't find out is that, that, you know, there was another pipeline that had been hacked at the same time, they never told the government. So the reason you need to tell the government is not just so that the government can try to go after the bad guys, but they can warn other people in that sector. Now we finally have gotten legislation that's been bipartisan. It should have been put in the, the defense bill that just passed a few weeks back. We will get it in, but this is again, another area where I think the vast majority of Americans

• 46:00Speaker 01

  would think, well, of course, if, um, you know, somebody breaks in and, and particularly if it's critical infrastructure and the bad guys are inside, you ought to tell, you know, you ought to tell the police, you ought to tell the FBI or in the case of telling the government, it's called CISA, the, the cybersecurity agency. And we would give the company immunity, we would give the company confidentiality, but we need that to share then with other private sector partners. So it's.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  There are a lot of areas where legislation has not kept up with technology and consequently, we are more vulnerable than we should be.

• 46:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and quickly before we leave with the other big tech antitrust bills, how much of a full court press are you feeling from these tech companies and their agencies? Do you get calls from their CEOs? What's the state on that?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  I know many of the CEOs and most of them.

• 46:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  How often does Zuckerberg call you and try to be like?

• 46:53Speaker 01

  I've gotten pretty frustrated with Mark over there, whether it's Apple or Google or others.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, for example, there are some legitimate questions on one of the bills that I'm working with Amy and Chuck Grassley on about, you know, not allowing a platform to give priority to its products over other products. So that's what the legislative process is about, though. If there are, if there's an idea here, let's go ahead. And, you know, the old fashioned how bill becomes a law, let's have committee hearings on it. Let there be a discussion at the committee, try to work out, try to work out some of these problems. It goes to the floor, there's a debate on the floor. In our legislative process, you know, in the past at least, did a halfway decent job of working through problems as an idea becomes a law.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, our process has broken down a lot where bills are skipped over the committee process and brought directly to the floor, sometimes without enough debate. And you consequently end up with products that, and sometimes bills that have got unforeseen consequences. My hope is we go down this, this potential antitrust product process, and I'm not at the extreme end on the antitrust process. I do feel like complete breakup might seed the field of some of these Chinese firms, but I do think there are some of these first steps that we ought to take. I also think there's a lot of these issues around pro competitiveness, you know, data portability, interoperability, banning dark patterns, trying to let researchers have more visibility into the algorithms these platforms use.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  That would, that would be short of antitrust, but that would still give consumers a more transparency and frankly, give new startup companies a better chance.

• 48:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Gut feeling is something going to pass this year?

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Hey, listen, you got to stay optimistic in this job, so I will make the bold prediction, absolutely. 2022 is the, is the year that we're going to put at least some guardrails around big tech.

• 48:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, Senator Warner, thanks so much for joining. I want to make sure you get to your next meeting on time, but I appreciate you coming in and giving our listeners and myself an idea of what's happening in Washington and the state of affairs when it comes to big tech. Thanks for joining. Alex, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Nick Guattini, for editing the audio. Appreciate it. Thank you, Red Circle, for hosting and selling the ads. And thanks to all of you, the listeners, for being here. If it's your first time, we do these every Wednesday, Tech Insiders and Outside Agitators, so please hit subscribe. If you've been here for a while and like the show, a rating would go a long way. So if you give a rating, that would be great. We will be back next Wednesday with a new edition of Big Technology Podcast. We hope you join us for that. Until then, take care and have a great week.

• 49:43Speaker 05

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked $350,000 for Virginia's health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.