As POTUS, Biden will overturn Trump's immigration EOs, support net neutrality and may not prioritize Section 230 reform but his approach to antitrust is unclear
Joe Biden's election as the 46th president of the United States gives the tech industry a reason to breathe a brief sigh of relief …
ProtocolIssie Lapowsky
Context & Ripple Effects
The election closes out a four-year stretch in which the industry's policy fights ran through Trump's pen: immigration executive orders that restricted tech hiring and a push to weaponize the FCC against social media protections. Democratic strategists had already predicted months earlier, per Axios's reporting, that Biden would start 'nothing too aggressive' while running a relationship 'less cozy than with Obama.'
The open question is enforcement rather than direction: the campaign had committed to repealing Section 230 while drawing sharp contrasts with Trump's executive order — favoring more content moderation, not less — yet the new administration signals no urgency on statutory reform, and its antitrust posture remains undefined.
First-order effects
Platform companies gain near-term regulatory breathing room on two fronts: net neutrality rules return through an administration that supports them, and Section 230 reform drops off the priority list, removing immediate legislative risk for Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Tech employers and their immigrant workforces are the direct beneficiaries of reversing Trump's immigration executive orders, which had constrained visa-dependent hiring pipelines.
Second-order effects
With the White House deprioritizing Section 230 legislation, pressure shifts to state legislatures and private advertisers to fill the moderation-policy vacuum — and to the campaign's own stated preference for a repeal rewritten around more moderation, keeping the issue alive rather than settled.
An unclear antitrust stance leaves the FTC and DOJ without a declared posture, forcing large-platform rivals and would-be acquirers to price merger risk against congressional momentum instead of executive-branch signaling.
The eventual reversal of Trump's social-media executive order, confirmed when Biden formally revoked it in 2021, points toward a structural norm: platform liability policy oscillating with administrations rather than being resolved by Congress, keeping Section 230 permanently contested terrain.
The trend: US tech policy is entering a phase where the existential threats of the Trump era recede, but bipartisan antitrust and platform-accountability pressure builds underneath a friendlier surface.
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