These days, Silicon Valley occupies a fraught place in the American psyche, one far bigger than the slice of California it fills geographically. It’s at once a hotbed of innovation, a threat to democracy easily exploited by Russia and others, a gobsmackingly powerful economic engine, a privacy-gobbling leviathan, a factory churning out our cherished digital tools, a social-division-exacerbating menace, and also, just maybe, the United States’ last best hope.
Sitting at the center of all that is Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing a sweep of Silicon Valley that’s home to the headquarters of Apple, Intel, eBay, Yahoo, LinkedIn Tesla, and workers from scores of those companies and others, including Google.
Khanna, 42, was born in Pennsylvania, where his parents settled after immigrating from India. He picked up an economics degree from the University of Chicago—where he campaigned for an Illinois state Senate candidate named Barack Obama—and a law degree from Yale before heading west to California on the advice, says Khanna, of famed tech-legal scholar Larry Lessig. “He said the most interesting place to practice is at the intersection of technology and law, and you really ought to come out to Silicon Valley.” In 2009, President Obama appointed him deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce, where he stayed until 2011.
Elected to Congress in 2016, Khanna has emerged in his brief time in office as both an apostle for Silicon Valley’s promise and, more recently, House Democrats’ point person for cleaning up its excesses. Khanna has ventured thousands of miles from his Fremont, California, district, to struggling spots like Paintsville, Kentucky; Youngstown, Ohio; and Flint, Michigan, exploring and promoting the idea that the same spirit that created Silicon Valley can revitalize America’s left-behind places via tech training programs and new jobs. Meanwhile, back in Washington, Khanna has been tasked by Nancy Pelosi—who’s on track to become the speaker of the House when Democrats take control of the chamber come January—with something called an “Internet Bill of Rights,” a legislative attempt to ensure that Americans’ privacy and other online freedoms aren’t crushed by the sprawling multitrillion-dollar tech industry.
On a cold and sleety Washington, D.C., day, Khanna sat down in his fifth-floor Capitol Hill office with POLITICO senior technology reporter Nancy Scola to talk about his vision for what tech can—and must—do for America. Khanna was prepping for his latest trip into the heartland, this one to the tiny central Iowa town of Jefferson.
Iowa’s a coincidence, says Khanna. He insists he’s not eyeing any sort of 2020 White House run. But Khanna finds himself busy trying to invent solutions that could, at once, pay off for his district, his party and his country. “I believe I represent one of the most consequential places in the world, that’s transforming the nation and the world,” said Khanna. “And our ability to do that in a thoughtful way is going to be critical to the nation’s future.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
NANCY SCOLA: We’re about two years into your travels. What’s your current working theory on how tech can help revitalize the country’s struggling places?
REP. RO KHANNA: People in this country should be able to find economic opportunity and meaningful jobs in the places they grew up. Right now, often these jobs are aren’t in these communities. It’s very hard to move because the places that do have these jobs have exorbitant housing prices. And many people don’t want to move. I believe that technology offers the opportunity to stay in the communities where you grew up and have options.
My travels around the country have led me to believe that many communities want this diversity of opportunity. They're proud of the traditional industries, whether it's coal or steel, or of course doing military service, but they want their kids to have opportunities beyond that. And my belief is that we can bring these innovation jobs across America, by creating economic opportunity in places that have been left out of the prosperity.
If we can show that technology is going to open up new doors and new avenues and new possibilities in communities that have felt left out since the 1970s, and bring them back stronger than ever, I think that is our best hope of stitching this country back together.
We have to define American patriotism as future-oriented. Trump is defining it nostalgically and exclusively. But there has to be a common vision of America we’re offering people—not just a sense of, “Here’s what we’re going to do for you in terms of your wages, your health care,” but, “Here's your place in a future America that’s going to lead the world.” I think that’s the magic of what Silicon Valley can offer if done right, because ultimately people still see the place with a sense of wonder and awe and inspiration.
SCOLA: But this idea of communities extending a hand to the tech industry—we’re right on the other side of the process where, after a drawn-out national competition, Amazon selected for its headquarters expansion maybe the two most obvious places: a few miles from here right outside D.C. and New York City. If I’m a local leader, aren’t I thinking, “Eh, why bother?”
KHANNA: It was a missed opportunity. I analogized what Amazon did to LeBron James’ “Decision,” when he went around saying, “I want every NBA team to bid on me,” and everyone knew he was going to go to the Miami Heat. It would have been much better if he hadn’t gotten everyone’s hopes up. Amazon ended up picking places that have no real difficulty attracting business.
But the problem can’t just be laid at the feet of the tech companies. The companies need to do a better job of imagining where the talent is, but communities need to have the basic ingredients that allow them to make those bets. Making sure the workforce and infrastructure are there, that's a project for government. And the challenge is that we don’t have strong federal policy for a transition from an industrial to a digital age.
SCOLA: Legislation you’ve put together would upgrade the 1862 Land-Grant Act, which created land grant colleges—the tech institutes of their day. But it actually wasn’t that expensive for the federal government, since at the time, most of the land was unused. You, on the other hand, want the federal government to provide $50 million to $100 million per school for 50 schools. Isn’t that a much tougher sell?
KHANNA: It is a tougher sell, but it’s such a small amount of money when you look at it. A hundred of these institutes would be $5 billion. Compared to a $1.4 trillion tax cut, or compared to the proposals that we have on so many of our economic priorities, spending $5 billion to help transition this country from an industrial to a digital age is not a significant cost.
A lot of what motivated the land grant at the time was you could either go to Harvard or Yale, but you couldn’t go to college if you weren’t going to an elite university. I mean, Lincoln couldn't go to college. So, the land grants were the democratization of higher education. Well, we need the democratization of tech education, particularly in communities left out.
SCOLA: How have your fellow Democrats in Congress responded to your national tech-jobs push?
KHANNA: I think they’re intrigued, but I don’t think it’s on the top of their mind. There are other issues that they prioritize. But I fundamentally believe this is a missing part of a Democratic vision. Yes, we have to be the party for economic security. We have to be the party of the $15 minimum age. We have to be the party of Medicare for All. We have to be the party that allows anyone to go to college. But we also have to be the party of economic aspiration.
What is the alternative for the Democratic Party? I don't think it’s right for the nation that you write off communities, and you’re not going to compete with Trump in selling legacy industries. We have to have an answer for folks about how their communities are going to have economic mobility and jobs in the future.
SCOLA: But you and others have talked about how this economic isolation has driven people to Trump, to Republicans. At the moment, at least, both the White House and Senate are controlled by Republicans, and that means you’re likely going to need their buy-in. Why would they buy in if, if it succeeds, it might drive voters away from their party?
KHANNA: Well, it won’t drive voters away probably for another five to 10 years. And I don’t know if Trump really cares who’s president after him.
Second, it’s the only thing we can do if we’re sincere about competing with China. The way to compete with China is not by copying China. It’s not to engage in a tariff war and state-run capitalism. It’s to double down on our comparative advantages, which is our human potential, our human capital in every part of the country.
Trump in particular could be part of the solution; it could be part of his legacy. He’s succeeded rhetorically, but he hasn’t succeeded in actually improving the prospects of these communities. To the extent that he cares about a legacy for building that part of America, you could see him wanting to cooperate.
SCOLA: Switching gears, you recently put out an “Internet Bill of Rights” to address concerns about data privacy and more, after being tasked with the job by Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. How did that come together?
KHANNA: She asked me after the hearings with Zuckerberg. [Note: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before both the U.S. Senate and House in mid-April, hearings sparked by the misuse of Facebook users’ data by the firm Cambridge Analytica.] There was a sense that there was a technology gap in Congress. She knew I represented Silicon Valley and understood technology, and that I’d worked in the Obama administration, which had an Internet Bill of Rights effort. She understands that this is an issue on the minds of a lot of Americans. We have to make sure that their freedom and security is protected in the online world.
So I reached out to some of the folks in the [Obama] administration and found out that we needed to involve a lot of the public interest groups that weren’t part of the process in the past. We went through about 20 different iterations. I think we struck the balance in having consumer groups, technological experts and technology business leaders on board. We haven’t gotten much pushback from tech leaders. My hope is that the Energy and Commerce Committee will now take it up in piecemeal legislation.
SCOLA: About that “tech gap in Congress”—you said it was on display during the Zuckerberg hearings, and there’s been increased chatter about bringing back the Office of Technology Assessment. It existed to give Congress expert advice about tech; Newt Gingrich defunded it in the mid-1990s as part of his “Contract with America.” Should Congress bring it back?
KHANNA: It’s one of the biggest things we could do. If we could have academics or people from industry with real technical competency, it would be a big asset for Congress. It would avoid the embarrassments of the Zuckerberg hearings. To ask Facebook how they make money, or “How should we regulate you?”… Several senators mispronounced Zuckerberg’s name. I mean, that’s just culturally illiterate.
They’re a lot of very smart people [in Congress]. They just haven't paid attention to the technological transformation of the economy and what this means for both defining rules and job creation. And the voters are going to expect that. They see a staleness, a Congress that's out of touch. The world is moving so fast, and it's almost like Congress is from a different age, a different era.
SCOLA: Beyond the Cambridge Analytica situation, Facebook’s been criticized for allowing itself to be exploited by foreign actors to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election, and it seems like every couple of days they announce they’ve taken down another batch of nefarious accounts. Is that just the painful process they need to go through or is it, as some people say, clear-cut evidence the company still needs to be checked in some way?
KHANNA: Facebook went from 100,000 [users] to 2 billion in about 14 years. They probably scaled too dramatically too fast. In retrospect, they should have been hiring more people and investing more in artificial intelligence to do reviews, and now they’re reaping the consequences of a scaling that was not done with sufficient deliberation. And so now, when you're now sorting through 2 billion people and their content, it’s a very difficult project.
I think that’s what they have to do. I would just say, “Slow down.” The whole last couple of years should be a warning that growth isn’t the only criteria. They need to think more humanistically about the impact technology and their platforms are having on society.
SCOLA: And you think it’s possible for Facebook to do that sort of review at a global scale and still operate?
KHANNA: I do. Maybe it’ll slow down their growth a little bit. Maybe it would slow down their profits, but it would increase their public trust.
SCOLA: Do you worry that all the negative attention Silicon Valley’s getting right now diminishes its luster right as you’re going around the country trying to pitch it as a solution?
KHANNA: No, because when it comes to technology, I don’t think if you go to Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania they’re talking about the same things we’re talking about inside the Beltway. They’re talking about, “How do I get a good job? How do I participate in this?” Where they see a disconnect is, “Those folks are doing all this stuff, and we don't get to participate. What happened to us?”
SCOLA: Going back to Congress, what do other members not get about Silicon Valley’s CEOs and other leaders?
KHANNA: I think they see them as winners in society, but they haven’t seen their struggle. These are folks who were often fired from other companies. They were different, took risks, had credit card debt, and they saw themselves as struggling against a system. [The tech leaders] see themselves more as scrappy entrepreneurs than society’s winners.
[Tech industry leaders] want to leave a world better and more informed, where citizens are more connected and empowered. They are not driven just by bottom-line profits. There’s no question there’s been abuses, but any time there’s a new technology there are things that are unanticipated and that go wrong. And they were probably blinded by a technological optimism. But now that they have seen some of the side effects, I believe they genuinely want to improve these platforms.
SCOLA: There’s a lot of talk in Washington about the possibility of antitrust enforcement against tech. What’s your thinking of how U.S. antitrust law should be applied to Silicon Valley?
KHANNA: We need to have strong antitrust law that creates competition, but I will say that in the tech world, yesterday’s behemoth is not today’s behemoth. I would be very, very surprised if 10 years from now we were having this conversation and Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter were still the dominant companies. I imagine new companies will emerge. We need to make sure that is possible.
How do we do that? We’ve got to have data portability, so that people can take data to other platforms. We need to make sure that companies aren’t using their market dominance unfairly, so that startups and others can emerge. We want to make sure that people aren’t engaging in predatory pricing, undercutting markets to get market share and then raising prices. You [need to] have regulation—privacy regulation, data regulation, to make sure these companies aren’t abusing the market share they have.
SCOLA: And we should just wait out that process?
KHANNA: Unless there’s anticompetitive behavior, yes. Making sure that you have competition, that’s the government’s responsibility.
SCOLA: Louis Brandeis, both as a progressive reformer and Supreme Court justice, warned of the “curse of bigness,” though he was talking about the railroads and Washington. Are companies like Google and Facebook simply too big?
KHANNA: I think that you have to be big and indispensable.
I don’t think American life requires you to be on Facebook. It does require you to have access to the Internet. Is it going to kill someone if they’re not doing Google search or Yahoo Search or Bing Search? If someone were to tell me that there’s a large monopoly restricting a person’s access to the Internet—the equivalent of the railroad, the Internet service provider—I would be much more concerned.
People have a choice of leaving [platforms like Google and Facebook]. And I have no doubt if somebody came up tomorrow with something that was better, they would gain traction.
SCOLA: Given your willingness to critique Silicon Valley, what’s the response to you there? Are they OK with you?
KHANNA: I think they’re OK because I defend them as well. I’m a technology optimist, ultimately. The world is a better place because of these technology companies.
On May 9, 2017, Ro Khanna of California's 17th congressional district announced that he was a member of Justice Democrats and supported the organization's agenda
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