What can the tech industry expect in a Trump administration?
What can the tech industry expect in a Trump administration?
We have a new president, and his name is Donald Trump. His new job has some challenges, many of them tech-related. Over the next four years, many more drones will take flight. Self-driving cars may hit roads in larger numbers. The list goes on.
One issue Trump will face is where the people who build our tech are based. Trump said on the campaign trail:
“I was saying, ‘Make America great again.’ I actually think we can say now, and I really believe this, ‘We’re gonna get things coming. We’re gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries.'”
Marketplace Senior Tech Correspondent Molly Wood joined us to talk about President-elect Trump’s impact on tech policy.
How will he bring that plan to fruition?
It’s pretty hard to make a company do something. But there are certainly incentives that could be enacted, right? There are obviously tax incentives. There are potentially regulations, or lifting of regulation that might make it easier to bring jobs back to the United States. I think a lot of the issues that Donald Trump supporters were worried about were the sort of, like, disappearance of U.S.-based jobs, and certainly some of that was the result of trade, but a lot of that was also the result of automation. And that was something that didn’t get talked about by Donald Trump too much on the campaign trail. But it is going to be a huge technology issue going forward.
Trump has said he wants to close the internet in some areas as a security measure. How will the tech industry respond?
This is part of the reason that the tech industry has been very concerned about a Trump presidency. And again, none of this has been presented as official policy, so it is really hard to know what’s exactly going to happen. Certainly Donald Trump has fallen very, very firmly on the side of security when it comes to conversations about encryption. One can expect, and I think the tech industry is preparing for a lot of conversations about how to deal with security and also keep technology moving forward. And I would imagine a lot of those conversations are going to get a lot more pointed now.
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