Amid all the lies, innuendo, and politicking Americans have been subjected to during this exhausting election cycle, the tech policies of President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are off the radar. 

Policies at large, technology notwithstanding, have fallen to the wayside as the candidates frame the election as a “battle for the soul of the nation,” Biden’s dictum, or a revision of Trump’s clarion call to “keep America great.”

Despite the diametrically opposed ways in which Trump and Biden carry themselves, the pair of septuagenarians share a remarkably similar view of policy that impacts technology. 

The most outward difference between the candidates with respect to tech policy is style, not substance. But underneath the surface, there is some variation.

Seeking out contrasts between Biden and Trump’s tech policy agendas is made all the more difficult because one of the candidates and his respective political party hasn’t articulated clear positions, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), which recently issued a report on the topic. 

“While Biden has stated his positions on most of the issues tracked by ITIF, Trump has been much vaguer, offering few detailed positions,” the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank wrote.

One area of obvious divergence is the role of government, particularly its deep pockets, on technology research. Federal budgets approved under Trump have increased funding for research in artificial intelligence, but “overall they have sought to cut government support for research,” according to ITIF.

Biden’s campaign, however, has “highlighted its support for significantly increased public investment in research and development, and advanced production,” the group wrote. Biden also supports tougher regulation of many technology industries. 

Trump and Biden both support increased investment in rural broadband, but Biden envisions a larger role for the federal government on that effort. Those positions effectively flip, however, when it comes to wireless networks. 

“The biggest difference of what we have seen is this drive of apparently the Trump administration to build a nationalized network,” Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst at Recon Analytics, said of the administration’s on-again, off-again proposals to jumpstart a taxpayer owned 5G network.

The mere floating of such an idea is “perplexing because it’s the opposite of what we would expect from Republicans who are always the champion of private enterprise,” he said. “So from that perspective, yeah, it’s private enterprise as long as it’s not my friends.”

Back to rural broadband, which is mostly framed as a wired network effort, both candidates and political parties are in support but Biden appears to support more federal funding in that space. “It’s interesting to see the contrast,” Entner said. 

“For the wireless network, the Republicans are for a very strong government role and the Democrats seem to be much closer to that on a wireline network. Either way I think the established providers, and incentivizing them, have a much more important role to play because they have already existing networks that they can just expand,” he said.

Another area that enjoys bipartisan support is the growing effort in Congress to reform big tech. An antitrust report recently unveiled by House Democrats concluded that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google each hold monopoly power. As a result, the report and politicians from both parties have called for some parts of those respective businesses to be broken up.

“They’re coming after the big tech giants, and it’s both sides that are coming after them. … That doesn’t change” regardless of who’s in power at the executive and legislative branches of government, Entner said. 

The big difference on that front, if Biden wins the presidency with Democratic control in Congress, would be a probable resurgence of net neutrality, he said.

Both Trump and Biden, with some variance, support limiting Section 230 protections in the Communications Decency Act. This issue, the effective net neutrality debate of 2020, has led to calls, most vociferously by Trump and his supporters, for antitrust actions to be taken against Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

While Trump rejects and Biden questions the U.S. government’s consensus on trade policy and both call for a tougher stance against China, Trump’s is largely a unilateral approach and Biden supports a multilateral approach, according to ITIF. 

“When I look at what happened with the Trump administration and China, it is still a lot more bark than bite,” Entner said, adding that beyond the stylings of their approach there will be “no substantial difference.”

Neither candidate is likely to change the current trajectory that’s created a growing divide between China and the U.S., he said. 

“A lot of it is driven by the intelligence community and a lot of the concerns that we have seen have been that way even before” Trump became president in 2017, Enter explained. “I think the rhetoric will change. That’s the major thing.”

Meanwhile, manufacturing, a topic of heightened interest that’s inextricably linked to China, is “not returning [to the U.S.] in a meaningful way because you’re missing the supply chain,” he said. “You can bring one factory back, you can bring two factories back, but you need to bring hundreds of factories back. That is the problem. And even if you bring it back, most of it is automated and highly efficient … and it’s not going to add a lot of jobs.”

Moreover, with average wages for China’s factories on the rise, “the labor-cost advantage that China enjoyed has largely been eroded. It’s the supply chain advantage that is much harder to replicate,” Enter explained. America’s trade deficit with China is also disproportionately calculated and the punishment directed toward China is out of measure as a result, he said.

The general consensus is that, whoever wins the election in about two weeks, many of the regulations and policies that impact the tech industry, including IT and networking, will remain relatively unchanged. However, the presumably reserved and more traditionally finessed style of a Biden presidency compared to Trump’s combative and bombastic behavior could not be more antithetical.