Here’s what we know and don’t know about Kamala Harris and tech policy

Vice President Kamala Harris is all but certain to become the Democratic presidential candidate. She was suddenly catapulted to frontrunner status for the Democratic presidential nomination after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed her for the position, and now key power-brokers in the party have publicly backed her.  If elected, Harris would be a president with roots in California’s Bay Area —  the heart of the tech industry. 

Yet despite her ties to this region, Harris is largely a cipher when it comes to tech policy. As vice president, she is inherently connected to every policy of the Biden administration, but it’s difficult to untangle which parts she would continue and which she would change. Her key focus areas as vice president — including artificial intelligence — and her interests as a senator, and before that, as California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney, provide a handful of insights into what she might prioritize if she should become president.

We know where she stands on climate, we have some sense of how she feels about privacy, and we have a whole array of tantalizing statements about AI, but there are a wide range of key questions that she has yet to be asked or has successfully avoided answering. She remains an enigma when it comes to tech antitrust and the TikTok ban. And she has yet to speak directly to the issues that most concern the moneyed donor class of Silicon Valley, such as crypto regulation.  

“I think this is a big opportunity for the Democratic Party to do a little bit of introspection and say — where have they lost certain communities?” Box CEO Aaron Levie, who frequently donates to Democratic candidates, told The Verge in an interview. He said the party has seen “missed opportunities” with the tech and business community, like in pushing for taxes on unrealized gains, and failing to update the high-skilled workers’ H-1B visa program, and hopes for “a bit of a reset on some of either the policy initiatives, or just the the tone and the message from the party.”

For those in the tech industry, Harris’ policy stances are not particularly well-known, says venture capitalist and political strategist Bradley Tusk. A campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral campaign, Tusk says that’s largely because most tech regulation occurs at the state level, “so it’s not like she had this track record in the Senate, simply because they just don’t do very much.” That means there’s a lot to be learned in the next few weeks on where Harris plants her feet on a variety of tech issues. 

The Verge took a look into how the vice president’s background and legislative history could inform what a Harris presidency could mean for tech — the industry, workforce, and its impact on consumers.

Many of the recent legislative efforts to rein in the power of the largest tech companies gained momentum after Harris left the Senate. She was never one of the more outspoken politicians on antitrust policy to begin with. During the 2020 election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was the candidate out front calling for the breakup of Big Tech companies. Naturally, in 2019, The New York Times asked Harris point-blank whether firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google should be broken up. Instead of giving a direct answer, she steered the conversation to privacy regulation.

Still, she’s left open the possibility of enforcement. Also that year, she told CNN that “we have to seriously take a look at” breaking up Facebook. She also called the platform “essentially a utility that has gone unregulated.”

The Biden administration’s antitrust policy — as enacted by the enforcers he appointed, such as the Federal Trade Commission’s Lina Khan and the Department of Justice’s Jonathan Kanter — has been aggressive, maybe even unprecedentedly so. It’s not clear whether a Harris administration would keep that up. The question she dodged in 2019 will be increasingly difficult to avoid now that she’s facing down a self-proclaimed tech antitrust advocate in Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance.

Whichever path Harris chooses, she’ll find some friends in Silicon Valley, which itself has split on the issue of antitrust. (The most direct beneficiaries of antitrust policy, after all, are the rival companies.)  “There’s not a dinner that I’ve been at where three people can agree on an antitrust policy,” Levie said. “I have friends that are the most ardent supporters of capitalism, of free markets, that also like what Lina Khan does to keep Big Tech in check.”

When avoiding the Times’ question about breaking up Big Tech in 2019, Harris said that “the tech companies have got to be regulated in a way that we can ensure and the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised.” She added, “My first priority is going to be that we ensure that privacy is something that is intact.”

The statement sounds strong, but it doesn’t actually say much about what substantive policies she will endorse. She and other legislators grilled Mark Zuckerberg in a public hearing in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytic privacy scandal, but her adversarial comments at the time were more or less in line with the tenor of the entire hearing.

There is one area of privacy in which Harris has had a strong, substantive record: legislation and enforcement targeting the sharing of non-consensual images. But this specific issue has not materialized into a more generalized policy position on data privacy — it has rather been an extension of her work around online sex trafficking. 

While serving in the Senate between 2017 and 2021, Harris’ legislative focus on tech mostly centered around preventing the spread of non-consensual images on the internet. For example, in 2017, she introduced the Ending Nonconsensual Online User Graphic Harassment (ENOUGH) Act, which sought to make it a crime to knowingly distribute or threaten to distribute non-consensual intimate images. She also introduced the Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution Act (SHIELD) Act in 2019, similarly criminalizing the distribution of these kinds of images. That bill recently passed the Senate after it was re-introduced by Harris ally Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

Her work in this area predates her entry to Washington, DC. While she was California attorney general, Harris secured a guilty plea over a hacking scheme to steal intimate images off of people’s Google accounts. 

Non-consensual images and sex trafficking are not the same thing. But legislative and prosecutorial action directed at either have run into the same issue: Section 230, a legal liability shield for online platforms. While Section 230 does not immunize an individual from spreading nonconsensual images or sexually exploiting someone, when it comes to the modern era, the most sweepingly powerful action is to intervene at the level of the platform, whether that platform is a juggernaut like Google or a nonprofit like Wikipedia. The creation of carve-outs to Section 230 for both nonconsensual images and sexual exploitation follows more or less the same model with the same stakeholders and the same legal issues.

Notably, Harris pressed criminal charges against the top executives of Backpage.com, a personals website that hosted advertisements for sex work. After becoming a senator, Harris also voted in favor of FOSTA-SESTA, a law excluding sex trafficking from Section 230. (FOSTA-SESTA was, in part, a reaction to Backpage.) As with all laws implicating speech, there are concerns that FOSTA-SESTA was too broad. Sex workers and their allies have argued that the law puts them in more danger, since finding clients online allowed for a degree of vetting and information sharing with others in the industry that’s less readily available now. The controversy over FOSTA-SESTA likely isn’t over. 

As vice president, Kamala Harris was tasked with being a point person in the administration on AI policy, leading roundtables for both leading companies in the industry, and labor and civil rights leaders.

Companies and labs developing advanced AI are facing growing regulatory scrutiny due to the technology’s associated risks, including privacy issues, job displacement, bias and discrimination, deepfakes, AI-powered weapons, and the controversial potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could make these systems as intelligent as their human creators. To mitigate unforeseen risks, tech leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have urged the government to regulate AI.

Harris agrees, calling for “legislation that strengthens AI safety without stifling innovation” in an AI Safety Summit in the U.K. last November. At the summit, Harris said that they should “consider and address the full spectrum of AI risk threats to humanity as a whole as well as threats to individuals, communities, to our institutions, and to our most vulnerable populations.”

In March, Harris announced a government-wide policy that required U.S. federal agencies to show that their AI tools aren’t harming the public. (If they can’t meet those guidelines, they must cease using the system.) She has actively voiced concerns about how training data can introduce harmful biases and, when used at scale, could wind up discriminating against vulnerable populations.

“And when people around the world cannot discern fact from fiction because of a flood of A.I.-enabled mis- and disinformation, I ask: Is that not existential for democracy?” Harris said at the U.K. summit.

Levie said the current administration hasn’t had “major missteps in AI,” though he wishes they’d come out strongly in favor of open source AI. But he sees it as more of a forward-looking issue. “I think the concern you could have is, the next four years are the most important, probably, for AI regulation. And so to some extent, you do have to believe that the party has the wherewithal to make really good decisions,” he said.

In April, the U.S. enacted a law that could ban the popular social media platform TikTok as soon as January (unless its parent company, ByteDance, decides to sell it off). Even though President Biden signed the bill, Harris told reporters that a ban was not the goal.

“We need to deal with the owner and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok,” Harris told ABC News in March. She also added that TikTok has “very important” benefits, like serving as an income generator and “allowing people to share information in a free way.”

When asked about her specific views on TikTok itself during an on-stage interview at The New York Times DealBook summit last November, Harris declined to comment.

The Biden administration has had a less-than-rosy relationship with the crypto industry due to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler’s stance on how it should be regulated. Tusk said that he expects Harris will improve relations with the sector, even if it’s just by putting in her own SEC chair pick instead of Gensler.

Meanwhile, Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have indicated they would be open to a less regulated environment for crypto — Trump is even slated to speak at a crypto conference over the weekend. This deregulatory attitude has reportedly attracted $160 million in campaign contributions to the Republican party from the crypto industry, as well as public backing from the likes of prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz. (Their firm, a16z, has a $4.5 billion crypto fund.)  

As vice president, Harris has been tasked with addressing “root causes” of immigration from Central America. In that role, she focused in part on strengthening the economics of the region and secured private sector commitments from companies including Meta to help train entrepreneurs and small business owners there, and help women build their online presence and access financial services. Under Biden, the Department of Homeland Security has ramped up its use of border surveillance technology, a practice that could continue during a Harris presidency.

The right has already zeroed in on Harris’s tenure as so-called “border czar,” even though her actual role was focused on diplomacy with Central America. But immigration is much more than a border issue, and Harris would likely continue Biden’s policies with regards to legal immigration and visas. A key interest of the tech sector is in maintaining or expanding the H-1B visa program, which lets high-skilled workers remain in the country to work in highly specialized jobs. As a senator, Harris worked with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), to introduce the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which would “remove per-country caps for employment-based green cards,” according to a press release. “We must do more to eliminate discriminatory backlogs and facilitate family unity so that high-skilled immigrants are not vulnerable to exploitation and can stay in the U.S. and continue to contribute to the economy,” she said in a statement at the time. She has not spoken on the issue more recently.

Harris is much more of a known quantity when it comes to climate and energy policy. For that reason, she has already garnered support from some major environmental groups and business leaders in clean energy. That includes the League of Conservation Voters that rates lawmakers based on their environmental track records, and has given Harris a 90 percent on her scorecard. 

The Biden administration managed to pass legislation marking the biggest investments in clean energy and climate yet in the US. And the Environmental Protection Agency under Biden and Harris has introduced sweeping new pollution regulations for cars, power plants, and industrial facilities. All in all, the measures could transform the way Americans get around, how their homes are built, and how they get their energy.  

Nevertheless, the US is still not on track to meet climate goals it set under the Paris agreement of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent by the end of the decade. Donald Trump could try to wipe existing climate policies off the books. 

Harris is expected to defend those policies, of course. And there’s even some hope among climate advocates she could go farther than Biden to crack down on fossil fuels. Harris has taken a tougher stance, for instance, on fracking — going as far as filing suit against the Obama administration to stop offshore fracking back when she was California’s Attorney General.

Having spent most of her political career either in California or representing it, tech and entertainment companies were among the top contributors to Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign. According to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks political donations and groups together organizations’ political action committee (PAC) spending and employee donations, the University of California was the top contributor to her campaign at $209,00. Harris raised $144,00 from Alphabet, $137,000 from Disney, and $134,000 from AT&T.

Her 2016 Senate campaign saw support from people from similar groups, including Comcast, Apple, and Cisco. She also got support from Venable, a law firm where her husband, Doug Emhoff, worked at the time, overseeing its Los Angeles and San Francisco offices. Emhoff represented clients in the entertainment industry, as well as large corporations like Walmart and Merck, according to The New York Times.

Harris, who was born in Oakland, has some personal connections in the tech industry as well. Her brother-in-law, for example, is Uber’s Chief Legal Officer Tony West. She also attended the wedding of Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, according to The Washington Post. 

None of these ties or donations elucidate what a Harris presidency means for tech. Despite being from the area, she is not a Silicon Valley politician; despite being one of those leading the most successful push to whittle down the immunity shield of Section 230, she is not an anti-tech politician, either. 

But in an election year that saw both the passage of the TikTok ban and the once-in-a-generation DOJ antitrust suit against Apple, there are tech policy questions that Kamala Harris cannot avoid forever. The GOP ticket has already articulated its position — coherent or not — on some of those issues. It will be Harris’ turn soon enough.