Trump, Tech Industry Have ‘Every Incentive’ to Work on Jobs Growth, Says Petricone

The consumer tech industry's “mantra” is “all about change, and that change is good,” said Michael Petricone, CTA senior vice president-government affairs, on a TechFreedom podcast Tuesday speculating about how tech policy might look under a Donald Trump presidential administration. CTA and the tech industry want to “move forward” and “find common ground” with the new administration, “and see what we can do,” Petricone said. Trump as a candidate “ran explicitly on a jobs platform, and quite successfully tapped into a deep underlying insecurity on the part of a large number of Americans about their economic future,” he said. “If you look at the tech industry and you look at our companies, they are the companies that are driving the economy.” So Trump “has every incentive to work with us, and we have every incentive to work with him, and help him grow the economy and grow jobs,” Petricone said. CTA sees “a bunch of opportunities” emerging for the tech industry from a Trump presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress, he said. “You’re going to see a pro-business administration, you’re going to see a deregulatory administration.” Petricone thinks “we have a good chance to work together and roll back regulations that don’t make a lot of sense,” he said. Though the tech industry failed to persuade candidate Trump to publish a pre-election “technology platform” as Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton did, “there’s an upside to that, too,” in that the president-elect is no "ideologue," and therefore is “not locked into anything,” Petricone said. In his career, he has been "focused on doing deals and getting things done," he said.