The most raucous cheering of the night was prompted by Trump's promise to fire Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory agency that has filed a slew of lawsuits against crypto companies under the Biden administration.
In addition, Trump has promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the darknet marketplace Silk Road, who is currently serving a life sentence. Silk Road, where people bought and sold drugs and other contraband, was one of the first online services to accept bitcoin as a form of payment. The severity of Ulbricht's sentence is widely seen as disproportionate by bitcoiners, who have long called for his release.
Antitrust
An early indicator of the relationship the Trump administration wants to have with big tech will be the fate of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
Khan, at 35 the youngest ever FTC chairman, became a focal point in the election campaign. Among Democratic donors, her approach to antitrust enforcement and corporate power has been highly controversial. Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all faced legal challenges under her tenure, although some were more successful than others.
“Lina Khan is… someone who is not helping America,” Linkedin co-founder and Democrat donor Hoffman told CNN in July. Trump donor Elon Musk also expressed his disgust. “She will be fired soon,” he said of Khan last week.
Dan Ives, an analyst at financial services firm Wedbush, described Khan as a “nightmare for the tech sector”, adding that analysts believed her departure would act as a catalyst for more Big Tech deals. “Musk's influence for Trump could also catalyze and accelerate a possible Khan exit,” he said.
Trump has vaguely suggested that “something” needs to be done about Google, to make the company “more honest.” Vance has been more explicit, praising Khan for “doing a pretty good job.”
Vance appears to see divorces as a solution to what he believes is Big Tech's censorship of conservatives. “When companies like Facebook and Google censor American citizens, making it harder for Americans to speak in their own political process, that's a big problem,” the vice president-elect said in September, slamming Google's acquisition of YouTube in 2006 as an example. “I think there should be an antitrust solution to this.”
A new Trump administration is unlikely to drop antitrust cases against Big Tech, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a left-leaning technology trade group, said in a memo on Wednesday, noting that several of these cases began under his first term. “But he will likely try to use these lawsuits as leverage for the companies to get favorable treatment on speech and content issues.”
It is unclear whether Khan would serve under Trump. Her team declined to comment Wednesday. Bill Kovacic, a former FTC chairman, said the chances of this happening within a few weeks were “nearly zero.”
Joel Khalili, Morgan Meaker and Zeyi Yang contributed reporting.
