Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and I'm here today with our policy and regulatory affairs team, which is our newest operating group coming up almost on two years when Ted Elliott joined. And Ted was a former general counsel at Facebook. He was formerly in the George W. Bush administration. And he has two other members of his team here as well, Matt Spence, who is in

the White House and then the DoD is part of the Obama administration, and Matthew Colford,

who was also in the Obama administration in the State Department. So we have kind of a,

intentionally by design, a bipartisan range of perspectives in the room. But the goal today

is sort of thinking about now as things are

settling down, what are the implications for tech, given the outcomes? And just to launch things off,

how does it affect startups? Our thesis coming into the election was there's some things where it'll

make an effect, where the choice between a Republican president, a Democrat president would make a

difference for tech policy. But in many

instances, to a very large extent, there wouldn't be as big a difference as people think.

And that's because, one, many of the issues are nonpartisan or bipartisan in nature or

break down along lines in Congress, but not along necessarily Republican-Democrat lines.

Encryption is a classic example of that.

You had, until now, the leading proponents of backdoors, let's say, the leading opponents on the hill of encryption, have been Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican.

Both on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Yeah. They're on the, you would say, the pro-law enforcement, anti-encryption side. That's just to simplify.

Right. And then on the other side, on the pro-encryption side, you have similarly a Republican-Democrat pairing as the leading as the leading advocates of encryption. that would be Ron Wyden of Oregon, Democrat,

and Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky.

Yeah.

And foreign presidential candidate.

I mean, the traditional way you look at issues is left, right.

In a weird way, the best way, it's almost like forward backwards if you're looking at different tech issues.

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