While the private sector is rushing ahead to amass as much data as it can, governments and public policymakers are only just beginning to grapple with the unique challenges posed by data-driven markets. As a critical resource that is unlike anything that came before it, big data demands a robust policy response.
State inspection of foreign investments at home isn’t novel. Probing NGOs and mandating registration of foreign lobbyists are just two decades-old examples. What’s different today is that countries are accelerating and expanding these powers where they already exist, or freshly architecting them altogether. It’s a way for governments to address two things: perceived foreign influence over their domestic technology spheres, and perceived risks of foreign governments using investments and acquisitions to access sensitive data.
When executives at the biggest U.S. technology companies are confronted with the argument that they have grown too powerful and should be broken up, they have a ready response: breaking up Big Tech would open the way for Chinese dominance and thereby undermine U.S. national security. In a new era of great-power competition, the argument goes, the United States cannot afford to undercut superstar companies such as Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet (the parent company of Google).
New technologies now afford rulers fresh methods for preserving power that in many ways rival, if not improve on, the Stasi’s tactics. Surveillance powered by artificial intelligence, for example, allows despots to automate the monitoring and tracking of their opposition in ways that are far less intrusive than traditional surveillance. Not only do these digital tools enable authoritarian regimes to cast a wider net than with human-dependent methods; they can do so using far fewer resources.
Innovation is built upon an ecosystem that takes decades to mature. Yet, China has already made substantial advances in computer science, chemistry, engineering, and robotics, all of which pose a direct challenge to U.S. technological supremacy. However, the U.S. will remain dominant and largely unchallenged in biotech and medicine for the foreseeable future.
It is clear that U.S.-based technology companies will continue to shape the geo-economic trajectory of data governance, and thus play a key role in the trade, investment and diplomatic landscape in Asia. So long as the Big Tech lobby works closely in consultation with the governments of emerging economies to respect sovereign autonomy and promote citizen welfare over rabid corporate greed, it will continue to be a key stakeholder in shaping a free, fair and equitable digital future.
By acting as network architects and administrators, Beijing will be privy to data streams in real-time across a large portion of the world, enabling them to develop influence and power across a number of different matrixes.
Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinised — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files…
Since the invention of writing, human innovation has transformed how we formulate new ideas, organise our societies, and communicate with one another. But in an age of rapid-fire social media and nonstop algorithm-generated outrage, technology is no longer helping to expand or enrich the public sphere.
With 5G it is possible to do enormous amounts of computing at very high speeds and without having to connect the input device—a cell phone, say, or a self-driving car—to a wire of any kind. But those high speeds are possible only if the rest of the system (signal towers, base stations, distributed servers, and the megascale centers that house the data and do a great deal of computing themselves) is physically near enough to these input devices.
