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🇺🇸 Election 2020

Where does Bernie Sanders really stand on big tech?

Moving the Market: Bernie Sanders' sustained success and Elizabeth Warren's recent decline in the Democratic primary have Silicon Valley insiders taking greater interest in Sanders' stance on big tech. But for all his criticism of corporate greed, he's provided few specifics on how far he would actually go in regulating or breaking up the tech giants.

• The big picture: If Warren's plan to break up Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook would have posed an "existential" threat to those companies, as Mark Zuckerberg memorably put it, the influence of a Sanders presidency is much harder to predict.

The latest: In an interview with The New York Times editorial board, Sanders declined to provide specific proposals for reining in Silicon Valley or to elaborate on how his plans would differ from those of Warren.

• Sanders said he intended to enforce antitrust regulation on big tech firms, as well as Wall Street and the media sector, and that the U.S. must "look at antitrust legislation to bring more competition to the market."

• When asked for a specific definition of "a new antitrust standard," Sanders said Wall Street giants and Amazon should be broken up, but added: "I can’t give you a formula... I’m not sitting around the table with antitrust lawyers."

• When told that his plan sounded like "I know it when I see it," he replied: "No. It sounds like small businesses are not going to be able to compete. It sounds like low prices are not the only criteria for what we want in a society."

The upshot: When it comes to regulation, Sanders is eager to diagnose problems but far less eager to explain how he would remedy them. Warren had an antitrust philosophy — you can be a platform or a service, you can't be both — and applied it to each of the major firms. Sanders only seems to have complaints about inequity and abstract visions of a fairer world.

• That doesn't necessarily make the Senator from Vermont any more or less of a threat to Silicon Valley — it just makes him more of a question mark.

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Future of Privacy

Tim Cook vs. Bill Barr, con't.

Big in the Bay, big in the Beltway: Tim Cook is resisting the FBI's efforts to force Apple to unlock the iPhones used by the suspect in last year's Pensacola shooting, despite public pressure from Attorney General Bill Barr.

• The latest: Barr said Monday that his office had "asked Apple for their help in unlocking the shooter’s iPhones," but that "so far Apple has not given us any substantive assistance."

• Barr declined to comment when asked if he would consider a court order to force Apple to unlock the iPhones.

• Late Monday night, Apple said it was working with the FBI but reiterated its belief that giving government access to people's iPhones would create "a backdoor" that could be "exploited by those who threaten our national security."

The big picture: The standoff, which is part of a larger debate between Silicon Valley and Washington over privacy and security, is likely to ratchet up tensions between the two camps.

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Outside the Bubble

How Trump wins in 2020

Hot fire, via Snap's Peter Hamby in Vanity Fair: "Donald Trump... has derived much of his political success by ignoring Washington finger-waggers and connecting with the more primal instincts of his supporters... with or without the good graces of the national press and savvy insiders."

• "Trump stumbled into understanding something crucial about the electorate, which is this... one of the biggest splits in American politics is simply between those who follow politics closely and those who do not."

The big picture: "As much as Democrats and the press like to blame ideological and partisan bubbles for our broken political culture — Facebook! Fox News! — their pieties usually don’t include the fact that political media culture is a bubble of its own, a cocoon of college-educated and left-leaning professionals who read the same things, watch the same shows, and liked your last tweet about Lizzo."

• "In this world, the inside game is everything. ... The political media blob tumbles forward every day on the assumption that people are aware of these story lines and characters, that voters are tuning in, when many probably can’t tell you what channel this thing is on. The assumption should be that they are not."

What's next: "At this stage of the race — still early, yes — Democrats aren’t even close to grabbing the hearts and minds or even the eyeballs of the drop-off voters who stayed home on Election Day in 2016."

• "In fact, it’s worse: Many of those voters can’t even tell you who is actually running for president. This doesn’t mean voters are dumb. It means they’re normal — and that Democrats have serious work to do to reach them."

Market Links

• Kayvon Beykpour is trying to clean up Twitter (Wired)

• Tim Knight starts offering buyouts at Tribune (CNN)

• Phil Griffin may shake up the MSNBC lineup (Daily Beast)

• Abby Huntsman abruptly leaves "The View" (CNN)

• Sheila Nevins returns to Oscars race at MTV (Deadline)

Michael Tran/Getty

#OscarsStillSoWhite

The Academy snubs diversity

Talk of Tinseltown: Despite an effort to double female and minority membership in recent years, the Academy has once again announced a very white and very male list of Oscars nominees, inviting public scrutiny ahead of an otherwise increasingly irrelevant award ceremony.

• The big picture, via NYT's Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling: "Black actors and actresses were largely sidelined... The director’s branch again left out women, bypassing acclaimed work from Lulu Wang ('The Farewell'), Greta Gerwig ('Little Women') and others."

Bonus: The New Yorker's Richard Brody also hit the Academy for awarding nostalgia — "1917," "Once Upon a Time," etc. — and snubbing "the future of the art and the confrontational power of the best filmmakers," including the Safdie brothers and their breakout hit, "Uncut Gems."

🏆 What's next: Adam Sandler was snubbed. The Ringer's Adam Nayman explains why he deserves an Oscar.

See you tomorrow.