In February, about a hundred people gathered at Bloomberg’s Washington, DC office for a conference hosted by the startup incubator Y Combinator.
It was an event with some of the biggest names in the modern antitrust reform movement, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Both have been advocates of refreshing what they see as an outdated view of American antitrust law, which they believe has allowed the largest tech companies to evade scrutiny, stifling the would-be upstarts that Y Combinator made its name investing in.
Also speaking that day was Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), whom former President Donald Trump just named as his pick for vice president on the Republican ticket. Vance’s ties to Silicon Valley date back to before Trump was elected in 2016, when he worked for the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. He was at the small DC event earlier this year to, perhaps surprisingly, share the same message as Warren and Khan: Big Tech needs to be reined in.
“The fundamental question to me is, how do we build a competitive marketplace that is pro-innovation, pro-competition, that allows consumers to have the right choices and isn’t just so obsessed on pricing power within the market that it sort of ignores all the other things that really matter?” Vance told the audience.
He went on to specifically praise Khan, the Biden official many of his Republican colleagues have sharply criticized for her aggressive stance on blocking tech deals. “I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I actually think is doing a pretty good job,” he said at the Y Combinator event, which was dubbed RemedyFest, a reference to antitrust remedies such as break-ups of companies.
“I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I actually think is doing a pretty good job”
Like many powerful Republicans, Vance sees cracking down on Big Tech as a way to loosen the control a handful of Bay Area companies have over the way speech is distributed online. It’s an issue the right has taken up in both Congress and the Supreme Court as tech content moderation policies on election misinformation have increasingly come in conflict with what are now mainstream Republican talking points.
A few days before his appearance at RemedyFest, Vance said that “it’s time to break Google up” in response to a post on X claiming that Google News has increasingly cited more left-learning sources in recent years.
“I think that Google and Facebook have really distorted our political process,” Vance said at RemedyFest, which The Verge attended. “And I think that a lot of my friends on the left would agree with me, but they might disagree with me directionally about how to fix that problem.”
“It’s time to break Google up”
He said he worries that Google could display the results of a search about Biden’s competency to be president in way that unduly biases voters. “We have got to stop the craziness, and I think one way to do it is to stop the way that these companies control the flow of information in our country.”
In a 2022 televised debate, Vance said he thinks “the 2020 election was stolen from Trump,” an endorsement of the claim that predicated the January 6th riot and Trump subsequently being banned on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Earlier that year, Vance called the January 6th arrestees “political prisoners” in a post on X.
Garrett Ventry, a political consultant who previously served as chief of staff to former Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), told The Verge in a statement that Vance “is a welcome pick for anyone who is interested in reining in Big Tech’s monopoly power.”
Ventry’s former boss had been one of the leading Republicans in the failed, bipartisan effort to enact new tech competition before Buck chose to leave Congress. Last year, Buck and Vance both led a letter to the US Trade Representative and the Commerce Secretary urging them not to lock in competition policies that were under active discussion in Congress into trade agreements.
Vance has also been vocal about a more relaxed approach to regulating crypto
At the same time, Vance has also been vocal about a more relaxed approach to regulating crypto, a position that is seemingly aligned with Trump, and is also attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in PAC contributions from the likes of Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Elon Musk. At RemedyFest, Vance criticized Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler for his approach to crypto that “seems to be almost the exact opposite of what it should be.”
“The question the SEC seems to ask in regulating crypto is, ‘Is this a token with utility?’” Vance said at the event. “And if it’s a token with utility, then they seem to want to ban it. If it’s token without utility, they don’t seem to care.” Vance thinks tokens with utility can be regulated but shouldn’t be eliminated altogether.
He worries about over-regulating blockchain-based technology because he believes that challengers to social media incumbents like Meta will rely on it for features like identity verification. “If we’re not making it possible to do verification, then we’re going to make it really hard to challenge the existing incumbents in the space,” he said at RemedyFest.
It’s not yet clear how much pull Vance would have in a second Trump administration, or how Trump’s own views might conflict with his running mate’s. “VPs don’t set policy, presidents do,” Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, told The Verge in an emailed statement. “Bottom line is that Trump’s policies would destroy the Federal government as we’ve known it since The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. And if you don’t have a functioning Federal government, you can’t enforce antimonopoly law.”
Vance admitted at RemedyFest that he hadn’t spoken with Trump specifically about antitrust policy but said he thinks the former president’s “instincts on this stuff are quite good.”
Vance has long-running ties to the tech industry. He worked as an investor for Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and in 2016 was catapulted to the attention of the Silicon Valley elite with the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling memoir about growing up in Kentucky and Ohio. The book’s influence became hard to escape in some tech circles after Trump became president.
Thiel famously played a key role in helping elect Trump in 2016. He later helped bankroll Vance’s successful Senate campaign in 2022. Around that time, both Thiel and Vance invested in Rumble, a conservative competitor to YouTube.
While Thiel distanced himself from Trump after Biden took office in 2020, Vance leaned in. Republican donors from the tech world have been pushing for him to be Trump’s VP pick for some time. Last month, he helped bring to life a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco that was hosted by tech investors David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya of All-In Podcast fame.
Vance’s anti-Google, pro-crypto leanings are perfectly in line with a certain corner of Silicon Valley, as is his sympathy for the pro-natalist movement, whose obsession with declining birthrates is sometimes at odds with women’s bodily autonomy.
A tech executive who supports Biden and has met Vance multiple times described him as “based” to The Verge. “He is younger and gets it.”
Regardless of the impact that Vance may or may not have an potential second Trump term, there’s no denying that he would bring a strong view on how to regulate the tech industry to the White House. In his remarks at RemedyFest earlier this year, Vance called back to the inception of US antitrust laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and said many of the same arguments advocates made back then apply to the modern era.
“There was a recognition that concentrated private power could be just as dangerous as concentrated public power,” Vance said. “That insight is so important to recover on the right.”
