Biden taking “absolutely wrong approach” to crack down on Big Tech, critics say

…Another critic not entirely sold by Biden’s approach is Adam Thierer, a senior fellow for R Street, a nonpartisan, nonprofit policy research group. He tweeted that Biden’s “hotly worded” op-ed was “basically a call for America to become more like Europe on tech policy, with comprehensive, top-down, highly repressive controls on the information sector and digital innovators. This is absolutely the wrong approach for the US.”

Thierer told Ars that “the problem with the European Union model of tech regulation is that it leaves very little breathing room for innovation to occur because entrepreneurs are preemptively smothered by layers of convoluted, time-consuming red tape. Innovators are basically treated as guilty until proven innocent in the EU,” which makes it harder for EU tech companies to dominate global markets.

Even bleaker, Biden’s seeming urge, Thierer said, to adopt the EU’s “disastrous model of top-down, heavy-handed technological governance” could inadvertently pave the way for China to continue growing an outsize influence in the tech sphere. That, Thierer said, would pose risks to America’s global competitive advantage and collective national security—which are risks that Biden seems keenly aware of due to the seemingly unstoppable popularity of TikTok…

Suffocating US tech innovation is a possible outcome of passing any new law and, thus, a big concern for many lawmakers. Thierer told Ars that before passing any new federal laws, Biden should examine the patchwork of existing federal and state tech industry regulations to identify laws already impeding innovation. In EFF’s transition memo, EFF recommended that Biden review state laws to identify the strongest ones and not pass any federal laws that would preempt those state laws…