The Democrats took the majority in the House of Representatives, and the Senate remained firmly in the hands of the Republicans, which means the power struggle between the two chambers of Congress got even more real after Tuesday’s midterms.
Here’s what the outcome of the much-buzzed-about Tuesday election could mean for big tech:
The good…
With the chambers deadlocked, it will be much more difficult for Big Tech’s critics to push through much-threatened regulations on the industry’s ads and business practices. In other words, the wild west of the tech space may roam untamed until 2020.
The bad…
There are some regulations that Big Tech desperately wants to pass, like a federal privacy bill that would pre-empt a “much tougher bill” set to go into effect in California by 2020.
The Senate also added a few more notable tech-skeptics to the justice league:
Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, who proposed net neutrality, and Missouri’s Josh Hawley who, as former Missouri attorney general, opened antitrust and data privacy investigations into Google, Facebook, Uber, and Equifax.
The ugly…
Axios reports that the split Congress also means “profitable status quo” will likely continue in the healthcare sector.
Case in point: the dialysis industry. Last week we wrote about the US’ two dialysis giants and their $111m mission to defeat a California ballot measure aimed at capping their profits.
Welp, mission accomplished — and DaVita and Fresenius saw their stocks go up 11% and 9%, respectively.