JD Vance Likes Lina Khan and Crypto, Hates ‘Big Tech’

In February, around a hundred people gathered in Bloombergfrom the Washington, D.C. office for a conference hosted by startup incubator Y Combinator.

It was an event featuring some of the biggest names in the modern antitrust reform movement, including Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Both have advocated updating what they see as an outdated view of American antitrust law, which they believe has allowed the biggest technology companies to escape scrutiny, stifling the aspiring startups that Y Combinator has made a name for itself by investing in.

Also speaking that day it was Senator JD Vance (R-OH), who former President Donald Trump just named as his vice presidential pick on the Republican ticket. Vance’s ties to Silicon Valley date back to before Trump was elected in 2016, when he worked for 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 for me is: how do we build a competitive market that is pro-innovation, pro-competition, that allows consumers to make the right choices and is not so obsessed with pricing power within the market that it kind of ignores all the other things that really matter?” Vance told the audience.

He went on to specifically praise Khan, the Biden official who many of his Republican colleagues have harshly criticized for his aggressive stance on blocking technology deals. “I see Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration who I actually think is doing a good job,” he said at the Y Combinator event, which was dubbed RemedyFesta reference to antitrust remedies such as company dissolutions.

Like many powerful Republicans, Vance sees the crackdown on big tech as a way to loosen the control that a handful of Bay Area companies have over how speech is distributed online. It’s an issue that the right has taken up in both Congress and the Supreme Court, as tech content moderation policies on election disinformation increasingly conflict with what are now major Republican talking points.

Just days before his appearance at RemedyFest, Vance said that “It’s time to put an end to Google” In response to a post on X claiming that Google News has increasingly cited left-leaning sources in recent years.

“I think Google and Facebook have really distorted our political process,” Vance said at RemedyFest, which On the edge participated. “And I think a lot of my friends on the left would agree with me, but they might disagree with me directionally about how to solve this problem.”

He said he fears Google could display the results of a survey about Joe Biden’s fitness to be president in a way that unduly influences voters. “We have to put an end to this madness and I think one way to do that is to end the way these companies control the flow of information in our country.”

In a 2022 television debate, Vance said he thought “the 2020 election was stolen from Trump,” an endorsement of the claim predicting the January 6 riot and Trump’s subsequent ban on social media platforms like X and Facebook. Earlier that year, Vance called the January 6th detainees “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), said On the edge in a statement that Vance “is a welcome choice for anyone interested in controlling the monopoly power of Big Tech.”

Ventry’s former boss was one of the leading Republicans in the failed bipartisan effort to enact new technology competition before Buck chose to leave Congress. Last year, Buck and Vance both led a letter to the US Trade Representative and Secretary of Commerce, urging them not to block competition policies that were under active discussion in Congress in trade agreements.

At the same time, Vance has also been talking about a more relaxed approach to regulating crypto, a position that is apparently in line 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 Chairman Gary Gensler for his approach to crypto that “seems to be almost exactly the opposite of what it should be.”

“The question the SEC seems to be asking when regulating crypto is, ‘Is this a token with utility?’” Vance said at the event. “And if it is a token with utility, then they seem to want to ban it. If it’s a useless token, they don’t seem to care.” Vance believes that tokens with utility can be regulated, but should not be eliminated entirely.

He worries about overregulation of blockchain-based technology because he believes challengers to traditional social media companies like Meta will rely on it for features like identity verification. “If we don’t make it possible to do verification, we will make it very difficult to challenge existing incumbents in the space,” he said at RemedyFest.

It remains unclear how much influence Vance would have in a second Trump administration or how Trump’s own views might conflict with those of his running mate. “Vice presidents don’t set policy, presidents do,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute. On the edge in an emailed statement. “The 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 we don’t have a functioning federal government, we can’t enforce antitrust laws.”

Vance admitted at RemedyFest that he hasn’t spoken to Trump specifically about antitrust policy, but said he thinks the former president’s “instincts on these things are very good.”

Vance has long-standing ties to the technology industry. He worked as an investor for Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and in 2016 was catapulted to the attention of Silicon Valley’s elite with the publication of Hillbilly elegy, her best-selling memoir about growing up in Kentucky and Ohio. It became difficult to escape the book’s influence in some tech circles after Trump became president.

Thiel played a key role in helping elect Trump in 2016. He later helped finance Vance’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. At that time, Thiel and Vance invested in Rumble, a conservative YouTube competitor.

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 vice presidential pick for some time. Last month, he helped bring to life a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco, organized by tech investors David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya of All in podcast.

Vance’s anti-Google and pro-crypto tendencies are perfectly aligned with a certain corner of Silicon Valley, as is his sympathy for the pro-natalist movementwhose obsession with declining birth rates is sometimes in conflict with women’s bodily autonomy.

A technology executive who supports Biden and who has met Vance several times described him as “grounded” in On the edge. “He’s younger and he understands.”

Regardless of the impact Vance could have on a potential second Trump term, there is no denying that he would bring a strong vision to the White House on how to regulate the technology industry. In his remarks at RemedyFest earlier this year, Vance recalled the beginnings of U.S. antitrust laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and said that many of the same arguments advocates made at that time apply to the modern era.

“There was a recognition that concentrated private power could be as dangerous as concentrated public power,” Vance said. “This insight is very important to recover on the right.”