Regulation
JD Vance Likes Lina Khan and Crypto, Hates ‘Big Tech’
In February, about a hundred people gathered at Bloomberg’s Washington, D.C., office for a conference hosted by the startup incubator Y Combinator.
It was an event featuring some of the biggest names in the modern antitrust reform movement, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan. Both have been advocates for a revamp of what they see as an outdated vision of U.S. antitrust law that they believe has allowed the biggest tech companies to evade scrutiny, stifling the aspiring startups that Y Combinator has made its name investing in.
Speaking that day too was Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), who former President Donald Trump just named as his choice for vice president on the Republican ticketVance’s ties to Silicon Valley date back to before Trump’s election in 2016, when he worked for billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. He was at a small D.C. event earlier this year to share, perhaps surprisingly, 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 marketplace that is pro-innovation, pro-competition, that allows consumers to have fair choices and is not so obsessed with pricing power within the marketplace that it ignores all the other things that really matter?” Vance told the audience.
He went on to single out Khan, the Biden official whom many of his Republican colleagues have harshly criticized for her aggressive stance on blocking tech deals. “I consider Lina Khan to be one of the few people in the Biden administration who I think is actually doing a good job,” he said at the Y Combinator event, which was nicknamed RemedyFesta reference to antitrust measures such as the splitting of companies.
“I consider Lina Khan to be one of the few people in the Biden administration who I think is actually doing a good job.”
Like many powerful Republicans, Vance sees the crackdown on big tech as a way to loosen the control a handful of Bay Area companies have over how speech is distributed online. It’s an issue the right has taken up in both Congress and the Supreme Court as tech-driven content moderation policies on election misinformation increasingly conflict with what have become mainstream Republican talking points.
A few days before his appearance at RemedyFest, Vance said that “It’s time to dismantle Google” in response to a post on X that argued that Google News has increasingly cited left-wing sources in recent years.
“I think Google and Facebook have really distorted our political process,” Vance said at RemedyFest, which The Verge attended. “And I think a lot of my friends on the left would agree with me, but they might not agree with me on how to fix this.”
“It’s time to break up Google”
He said he feared that Google could display search results about Joe Biden’s competency to be president in a way that could unduly influence voters. “We have to stop the madness, and I think one way to do that is to stop the way these companies control the flow of information in our country.”
In a 2022 televised debate, Vance said he thought “the 2020 election was stolen from Trump,” an endorsement of the statement that predicted the January 6 riot and Trump’s subsequent ban on social media platforms like X and Facebook. Earlier that year, Vance called those arrested on January 6 “political prisoners” in a post about X.
Garrett Ventry, a political consultant who previously served as chief of staff to former Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), told The Verge that Vance “is a welcome choice for anyone interested in curbing the monopolistic power of Big Tech.”
Ventry’s former boss had been a leading republican in the failed bipartisan effort to implement a new technological competition Before Buck has chosen to leave CongressLast year, Buck and Vance both drove a letter to the U.S. Trade Representative and the Secretary of Commerce, urging them not to block competition policies which were under active discussion in Congress for conversion into trade agreements.
Vance also spoke out in favor of a more relaxed approach to cryptocurrency regulation
At the same time, Vance has also spoken out in favor of a more relaxed approach to cryptocurrency regulation, a position that is apparently 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 Chairman Gary Gensler for his approach to cryptocurrency that “seems to be almost the exact opposite of what it should be.”
“The question the SEC seems to be asking when they regulate cryptocurrencies is, ‘Is this a utility token?’” Vance said at the event. “And if it’s a utility token, then they seem to want to ban it. If it’s a non-utility token, they don’t seem to care.” Vance thinks utility tokens can be regulated but shouldn’t be eliminated altogether.
He worries about over-regulation of blockchain technology because he believes incumbent social media challengers like Meta will rely on it for features like identity verification. “If we don’t enable verification, then we’re going to make it really hard to challenge the incumbents in the space,” he said at RemedyFest.
It’s not yet clear how much influence Vance would have in a second Trump administration or how Trump’s views might conflict with those of his running mate. “Vice presidents don’t set policy, presidents do,” Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, told The Verge in an emailed statement. “Bottom line, 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 had not spoken specifically with Trump about antitrust policy, but said he thought the former president’s “instincts on these things are pretty good.”
JD Vance at the ultra-exclusive Sun Valley tech and media conference in 2017. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Vance has long-standing ties to the tech industry. He worked as an investor for Thiel’s Mithril Capital and was catapulted to the attention of Silicon Valley elites in 2016 with the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling memoir about growing up in Kentucky and Ohio. The book’s influence has become hard to miss in some tech circles after Trump became president.
Thiel famously played a key role in helping elect Trump in 2016. He later helped fund Vance’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. During that time, both Thiel and Vance invested in Rumble, a conservative YouTube competitor.
While Thiel distanced himself from Trump after Biden took office in 2020, Vance stepped up. Republican tech donors have been pushing for him to be Trump’s vice presidential pick for some time. Last month, he helped launch a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco hosted by tech investors David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya of the All-In podcast.
Vance’s anti-Google and pro-crypto leanings are right in line with a certain corner of Silicon Valley, as is his sympathy for the pronatalist movementwhose obsession with declining birth rates is sometimes at odds with women’s bodily autonomy.
A tech executive who supports Biden and has met with Vance several times described him as “grounded” to The Verge. “He’s younger and he gets it.”
Regardless of the impact Vance might have on a potential second Trump term, there’s no denying that he would bring a strong vision to the White House for how to regulate the tech industry. In his RemedyFest speech earlier this year, Vance recalled the inception of U.S. antitrust law 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’s a recognition that concentrated private power could be just as dangerous as concentrated public power,” Vance said. “That recognition is so important to recovering on the right.”