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Supervisor Aaron Peskin on Columbus Avenue in North Beach: “I’m proud of the people of San Francisco, and I’m proud of the effort that my team and courageous San Francisco leaders made.”Elon Musk jumps on the stage as Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show, Oct.
5, 2024, in Butler, Pa. In some sectors of the tech industry, Donald Trump’s reelection to the presidency has been greeted with exuberance over the sense that good times are ahead. But for most companies in the industry, that might be a false hope, according to experts on technology law and policy. Many of Trump’s expected policies, such as those affecting immigration and trade, will likely hurt the industry and the economy at large, they say. Even in other areas where he might be expected to put in place policies that are more favorable to tech companies, it’s hard to know what to expect because Trump can be capricious and unpredictable, often motivated by greed or grievance rather than any kind of principle, they said. Indeed, the tech industry should be worried about the incoming administration because Trump has no respect for the rule of law, and he has made clear that he plans when reassuming the presidency to settle old scores with perceived enemies including those inside the industry, said Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University’s law school and the co-director of its High Tech Law Institute.“I’m frankly shocked by seeing some of the wealthy people who are embracing Trump, because they are playing with fire,” he said. Last year’s election saw a rush of prominent people in the broader tech industry embracing Trump. Tesla CEO Elon Musk campaigned with the former president and appears toFellow venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz endorsed Trump on their popular podcast. Jesse Powell, a co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, whichIn making the case for Trump, Andreessen and others in San Francisco and Silicon Valley argued he would reverse Biden’s policies that they said had harmed the tech industry. They and other venture capitalists — including some who backed the Democratic ticket over Trump —for a sharp drop in acquisitions of startups, a key way they cash in on their investments. They and others in the tech industry also charged that the administration’s regulatory and enforcement policies were stifling startup innovation, particularly in the AI and cryptocurrency sectors. And there’s a wider sense in the business community that as a Republican, Trump will be more beneficial to their interests. Musk is helping lead a task force that’s promised to cut government spending and regulation. And many of Trump’s nominees are being seen as more business friendly than Biden officials. “If you look at who Trump has surrounded himself with and what he’s talked about, that gives a lot of positive optimism to the financial market” and other business sectors, said Rob Siegel, a lecturer in management at Stanford Graduate School of Business who focuses on startups and technology. Trump is likely to be more friendly toward the cryptocurrency industry than the Biden administration was, said Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota’s law school who focuses on technology policy.started selling virtual trading cards of himself as non-fungible tokens — which, like cryptocurrency transactions, are recorded on digital ledgers called blockchains — in 2022. In September, Trump and his family, a cryptocurrency project that is selling its own token and plans to allow customers to borrow and lend other digital currencies. In the short term, Trump’s embrace of the crypto industry will likely benefit people who are invested in it, Rozenshtein said. But Rozenshtein is skeptical of the industry, saying it might well just be a “giant gambling Ponzi scheme.” “In the long term,” deregulating and encouraging the cryptocurrency business “could be an absolute disaster for the economy and the tech industry,” he said. On other fronts, it’s not clear exactly what Trump’s policies will be or how they’ll differ from Biden’s, if at all.that represented an initial effort to figure out how the federal government would use and regulate AI. While most of the order was focused on government agencies, the order required developers of leading-edge AI models to keep the government in the loop about those models, including about the steps they were taking to secure and safety-test them., and there’s some sense that there will be fewer AI regulations under his administration, Rozenshtein said. Even if he does, it’s hard to know what policies he will put in their place, Goldman said. Regardless, there wasn’t a lot of AI regulation of the industry under Biden, and there wasn’t likely to be much more under Kamala Harris, who ran in place of Biden and lost to Trump, he said. That’s because there’s strong bipartisan support for AI in general, he said. “I don’t think there’s a big difference on AI” between the two parties, Rozenshtein said. “I think it’s always going to be full-speed ahead.” Much of the action on AI regulation is happening at the state level, Goldman noted. California had a yearlong fight over stateState Sen. Scott Wiener speaks about artificial-intelligence regulation at the TechCrunch Disrupt event at San Francisco’s Moscone West conference center on Wednesday, Oct. 30. If Trump wanted to promote the AI industry, he’d help design and push through a law that would preempt those state efforts, Goldman said. But that would require him to dig into the issues and lean on Congress, not simply fire off social-media posts, he said.Whether Trump will be beneficial to the tech industry on the antitrust front is also anything but certain. Many in the tech and VC community are certainly expressing optimism that he will be, and some tech-policy experts say they think there’s reason to think they’re right. The leaders of Biden’s antitrust efforts — Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter —in attempting to protect competition and enforce the law. Trump’s appointees are likely to return to the more lax norm seen since the Reagan administration, said John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and law at UCLA. “The second Trump administration is going to be far less interventionist than the Biden administration has been ... particularly involving things like mergers and acquisitions,” Villasenor said. Such a move might be good for the tech giants and venture capitalists, but it’s likely to be bad for the tech industry as whole and innovation over the long haul, Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School, said in an email. But it’s not at all certain that Trump will be easier when it comes to antitrust enforcement in the tech industry. Under his previous administration, the government filed antitrust suits againstappointed Gail Slater, a staffer in Vance’s senate office, to take Kanter’s role at the Justice DepartmentLina Khan, the nominee for Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission , speaks during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing, April 21, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington. “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!” he saidthat started during his first term and continued through Biden’s, Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a blog post.But if Trump’s policies on antitrust and AI are uncertain to benefit the tech industry, his policies on trade and immigration are likely to be detrimental to tech companies, policy experts say.Many consumer tech products that are designed by American companies, such as Apple’s iPhones or Microsoft’s Xbox video-game consoles, are manufactured overseas. Tariffs would raise the prices of those items, potentially depressing sales, they said.— are imported after being manufactured overseas, noted Jesse Dodge, a senior research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. That’s likely to drive up the already pricey cost of creating and using AI models, he said. And other countries hit by U.S. tariffs are likely to respond in kind, potentially against American tech products and services, the policy experts said.“Never fight a trade war with tariffs, because everyone loses,” he said. Trump’s immigration policies could also be particularly harmful to the tech industry, according to experts who spoke with The Examiner. The president-elect Some experts say they think there’s reason to believe the president-elect won’t try to restrict highly skilled immigration, the kinds of people tech companies hire via the H1-B visa program. But that might be a false hope. In his first administration, With anti-immigration advisor Stephen Miller slated to again play a key role in Trump’s administration, there are heightened concerns among immigrants and immigration advocates that the president-elect will Even if highly skilled workers are excepted from Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, those policies are likely to harm the tech industry, policy experts said. By making it harder for companies overall to find workers, they’re likely to spur inflation, they argued. “Every move that Trump has promised to make, when it comes to business, seems designed to boost inflation,” Goldman said. Trump’s immigration policies are also likely to disrupt a key source of American innovation, policy experts said. There’s a long-established phenomenon in Silicon Valley of immigrants coming as students, staying to work at tech companies and then founding their own startups. Indeed, many of the founders and leaders of major tech companies and startups — including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla — are immigrants who originally came to the U.S. as students. But Trump’s policies are likely to discourage or even bar such people from coming to the U.S., policy experts said. “Cutting off that pipeline — both by making it harder for people to come here and by making it a less attractive place to be — will mean that innovation will increasingly occur outside the United States,” Lemley said. But even setting aside individual policies, the tech industry should be worried about how it will fare in the next Trump term, policy experts said. Trump is unpredictable, vindictive and out for himself, they said. Business thrives on stability and the certainty of the rule of law, they argued, and that’s not what Trump stands for or believes in.twolverton@sfexaminer.comSan Francisco’s public-school teachers say they are preparing for large-scale cuts to federal funding under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.only about 8% of elementary- and secondary-school funding , according to the department, but it also enforces civil-rights laws barring discrimination on the basis of race, sex — including sexual orientation and gender identity — and disability. While the incoming administration’s potential threats to public-school funding has met with widespread backlash in California, San Francisco teachers said they are more concerned about Trump’s plans for mass deportation which they say will upend The City’s diverse public-school student population and its families.to dismantle the federal department, which also provides funding for state public schools and programs that benefit low-income students and students with learning disabilities.of “indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material,” and being a “clear threat to what our students need to have a good education and a great life.” If the federal department is cut, Thurmond said, it could result in an estimated loss of $7.9 billion in federal funding for California schools. “If through some set of circumstances, the Department of Education goes away, we are prepared to introduce legislation that would guarantee funding for California schools and California education,” Thurmond said.in the November election. But San Francisco Unified School District employees said their top concern is whether Trump will allow Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers to arrest parents picking up their children from school. “In the last few weeks, even since the election, many teachers have reported that students and families are very concerned about their well-being and what’s going to happen,” Cassondra Curiel, President of the United Educators of San Francisco, told The Examiner. Trump also has repeatedly promised to enact mass deportations of immigrants lacking legal authorization to be in the country. When Trump was first elected in 2016, Curiel recalled preparing her school for a potential deportation raid. “We were making plans around what to do to protect our students during pickup and drop-off times, and what happens if we have a family member who dropped our students off in the morning and were nowhere to be found in the afternoon,” she said. NBC News reported in December, citing three sources familiar with the plan, that Trump plans on his first day in office to rescind a ruleCalifornia Attorney General Rob Bonta warned that school officials should be aware that the federal policy “may be modified, superseded, or withdrawn at any time with little notice.”, all students can attend public school regardless of their immigration status or that of their family members. As of 2021,“We have many students from all backgrounds, and is an inclusive environment,” Curiel said. “Still, we’re facing down the barrel of yet another high-rhetoric time period, and San Francisco isn’t an impermeable bubble.” James Denman Middle School math teacher Rori Abernethy described the winter break before Trump’s second inauguration as the “calm before the storm.” “I don’t think people understand the difference between this year and next year. I don’t think it’s sunken in yet,” she told The Examiner. “We got alerts and emails and guidance on what to do and how we’re protected if immigration officers come to our schools.” State legislators, preparing for a federal policy reversal, introduced legislation aimed at protecting students and their parents from the threat of deportation at schools.Assembly Bill 49, if passed, would prohibit staff at schools and child-care staff from allowing ICE officers to access such sites without a valid ID, written statement of purpose, court order and approval from the school district’s superintendent. “We know that this is coming, and we need to do everything we can to protect our immigrant students as well as their families,” Muratsuchi said.Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. 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