The following blog post is part of a series on corporate revolvers who diminished the Biden administration’s effectiveness when it came to helping working people. Click here and here to read our full rebuttals to Matt Yglesias’ error-filled celebrations of the revolving door (which he published in Bloomberg on August 4 and on his Substack on August 12). Long story short: Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.
Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information Alan Davidson was nominated to lead the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in 2021 and confirmed the following year. Before that, he served as Mozilla’s vice president of global policy, the Commerce Department’s digital economy director from 2015 to 2017, and Google’s inaugural director of U.S. public policy from 2005 to 2011.
In 2023, the NTIA released a report calling for more competition in the app marketplace. The report drew similar conclusions as the Open App Markets Act, a piece of bipartisan legislation that would require significant changes to Apple’s App Store. While the NTIA’s report was an encouraging push for greater competition in app markets, Davidson’s past work for Apple’s fellow Big Tech competitors calls into question how he would act if the consequences of a proposed NTIA policy were tilted against one of his former employers.
Davidson was Google’s Director of Public Policy for seven years and he opened the company’s Washington, D.C. office. After guiding Google’s growth into the lobbying giant it is today as well as helping to launch the company’s political action committee, NETPAC, Davidson left in 2011 amid growing scrutiny of Google’s monopolization of the search market.
Right now, the NTIA is considering whether to reduce the profit margins of VeriSign. This obscure company is one of the most profitable in the world thanks to its government-granted monopoly on annual dot com website registrations. In June, we joined the American Economic Liberties Project and Demand Progress Education Fund in sending a letter urging Davidson to investigate VeriSign for antitrust violations in order to bring about a competitive bidding process and stop the rising costs of website domains.
It remains to be seen how Davidson responds. If he prolongs VeriSign’s monopoly, that’ll be one more knock against Yglesias’ portrayal of the revolving door as a virtuous political mechanism.