Turning the page on the Biden administration's tech agenda.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

It's inauguration day and a veritable who's who of tech are in attendance for the swearing in of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States.

The massive presence of tech leaders, either overtly supporting or making nice with Trump, is a stunning reversal from his first term.

Today, we're looking back at what happened in between.

President Joe Biden was often seen as taking an adversarial approach toward the tech industry.

He appointed Lena Kahn to chair the Federal Trade Commission, a legal scholar known for advancing novel antitrust theories aimed at big tech.

She explained her approach on our show in 2022.

When you have dominant firms, dominant intermediaries or middlemen that have come to capture control over key arteries of commerce or communication, that type of power really can do a lot

of harm and lead to a lot of abuses. The FTC filed a lawsuit against Facebook. And in that

lawsuit, we note that one of the harms that resulted from Facebook's illegal behavior was a loss

in user privacy. And so that's an instance where,

in as much as data privacy is a relatively newer type of harm that we're seeing in some of these

newer markets, we're explaining to the courts why we think they should be taking that seriously.

The FTC also sued Amazon for alleged monopolistic practices. The agency tried and sometimes failed to block mergers, like the one between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.

And it boosted enforcement around privacy and child safety online.

Critics decried the aggressive regulatory approach. Here's Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association.

You had a very anti-business administration, death by a thousand cuts from almost every agency.

The worst was clearly the Federal Trade Commission, which just basically sent out the message

that big companies should not buy

small companies that changed from the antitrust standard going from what's best for consumers

...