In August 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched his plan for the “Clean Network.” The State Department envisioned creating an alliance of “clean” countries and companies that would follow the United States in its aim to constrain the growth and competitiveness of the Chinese tech sector. They would exclude Chinese components from their telecom networks, ban the sale of devices from Chinese brands, and even start blocking their citizens’ access to Chinese apps and services.

Once Joe Biden took power the following year, his administration ditched the racist name of the initiative, but kept the main thrust of what it was trying to achieve. Gone were the days when the internet was supposed to be open and whatever form it took had to be embraced by countries, companies, and users alike, lest they be accused of suppressing digital rights or opposing free speech. As the United States saw its tech industry facing real competition, it was reacting; not by embracing the free market principles it had pushed on everyone else, but by trying to corral its allies into a new bloc that would agree to remain under the boot of Silicon Valley to forward the United States’ geopolitical aim of thwarting the rise of the Chinese tech companies.

In essence, the US approach told the world it needed to choose: either you’re part of the “clean” world of democratic US technology or the “dirty” and dangerous alternative marked by the authoritarian tech of China. Forget that whatever side you’re on, companies are looking for the optimal way of extracting the most profit from you by harvesting your data, locking you into their walled gardens, and limiting your actual power over the technology you use. An initiative to protect the market power of Silicon Valley was repositioned as being about defending Western democracy and liberal values — part of the usual US playbook.

But that’s a pretty terrible choice to have to make. Why should we have to choose between Amazon and Alibaba or Google and Baidu — especially the vast majority of the world that is neither American nor Chinese? Accepting that binary is not the road to a better future of technology or for our societies more broadly, as that trajectory is defined by an exploitative vision for what digital technology must be to maximize power and profit. As US technological hegemony declines, the better path is to reject the choice it’s trying to force on the world and forge a new one centered around entirely different values.

Rejecting the US-China binary

For years, internet advocates have warned against restrictive policies by governments like those in China and Russia aimed at limiting access to specific content online. They said initiatives like the Great Firewall risked ushering in an internet that was increasingly balkanized into different spheres where users will have very different experiences of the web based on where they are. The “splinternet,” as some call it, was to be avoided at all costs, but maybe it’s time to reconsider that stance; maybe it’s time to embrace it.

The open internet as we once knew it was always a product of US hegemony. As the network went global, cloaked in narratives of free speech and democracy, US tech companies rode the wave to establish themselves in international markets before domestic competitors could effectively compete, then got US diplomatic support to ensure they wouldn’t be strictly regulated. As Senator Al Gore declared to the US Senate in 1989, “the nation which most completely assimilates high-performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century.” A few years later, he would become vice president and advance the commercialization and eventually privatization of the internet.

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The consequences of that policy are now being felt, and even US allies are becoming openly frustrated with how Silicon Valley firms now dominate significant parts of their economies and they’re limited in how they can respond without drawing the ire of the United States. Part of the reason China has been able to buck the trend and develop a tech industry that can rival Silicon Valley is precisely because it didn’t accept the US rulebook. While the Great Firewall does have a strong censorship component, at its core it’s a tried-and-true economic policy: by keeping out foreign competition, it gave its domestic tech companies the space to grow and improve their capacities to the point where they can go global like their US counterparts. It’s similar to what South Korea and Japan did decades ago to build up their electronics and automotive industries — though they did it with US permission.

As the United States turns to protectionism and an embrace of the kind of policies it would’ve spurned less than a decade ago, the true nature of its internet policy is being put on full display. It was never about the liberal ideals it wrapped the internet in, but was always about maximizing the power of its tech firms and the benefits the US state could accrue from them. Despite Silicon Valley’s libertarian rhetoric, there was a mutual benefit among tech leaders and the US government to see Silicon Valley go global, including everything from economic gains to the intelligence benefits enabled by its vast surveillance apparatus. In recent years, that’s become openly formalized as Silicon Valley has used (and arguably campaigned to advance) the hysteria against Chinese tech to forge closer alliances with the US defense industry and security state.

Seen through this light, the binary choice the United States is trying to force onto the world isn’t a particularly appealing one — not for US citizens, and especially not for those of other nationalities where governments have even less power to hold US tech companies accountable. An alternative to what the United States is offering doesn’t mean simply embracing Chinese tech or building national champions that still follow the same extractive model guiding the development of both, but wholly challenging the dynamics that have shaped the growth of the global tech industry for the past several decades.

A proposal for a collective splinternet

If we’re make a serious case for a splinternet, the central plank should be the elimination of massive global platforms like we’ve gotten used to over the past couple decades. Governments will have to use regulatory and legal tools to erode the power and influence of those firms, squeezing their business models by restricting the ways they can use and collect data and enforcing much stronger rules on their operations. Higher taxes wouldn’t hurt either — something the US has been holding up globally for years. Regulation of global firms can be hard when undertaken by a single state on the national level, which is why it’s so important to start building an alliance of states that refuse the binary choice being offered by the United States — and rein in both US and Chinese tech giants with sectoral rules.

At the same time as regulatory pressures escalate, governments will need to think about what alternatives look like. This is where forced interoperability and open protocols come in, as long as they’re paired with regulatory measures and efforts to build public technology. Users will still want to communicate and share things with people they know from around the globe, and they should still be able to do that. But access to those federated services should instead happen through platforms conceived of and developed on the regional, national, or even local level. That will allow governments and communities to exert much more power over how they work and what they deem acceptable on them — instead of leaving it to a global monopoly or a tech-savvy group that has technical skill few other people hold — and given the different rules and cultural contexts of different countries, the choices they make may differ.

For example, we’re already seeing a growing effort to regulate social media as governments acknowledge the consequences of the previous hands-off approach. Some might see that as curbing fundamental rights, particularly US internet advocates and foreign activists who’ve picked up their conception of free speech. But many countries do not have the same approach to free expression and tolerate greater enforcement. In Brazil, lawmakers want Twitter to respect its ruling to suspend far-right users involved in an attempted coup, while Australia wants it to take down videos of a recent stabbing at a church. Elon Musk has been resisting both, using “free speech” as a justification to protect right-wing accounts. The Australian case, in particular, will be an important test of the power of national governments outside the United States to regulate tech platforms. It wants the stabbing videos removed entirely, not just hidden from Australian users.

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Developing those alternative platforms shouldn’t just be left to private companies. In the same way many countries have always recognized an important role for public broadcasters, it’s time to reject the neoliberal consensus that’s dominated the internet and create public bodies whose job it is to develop technology in the public interest — not to serve founders or shareholders. The most exciting proposal I’ve seen in this vein is the British Digital Cooperative that Dan Hind conceived of in 2019. In his vision, a public cooperative would be established to build not just a public social media platform, but non-profit alternatives for payment processing, office software, and other digital services people depend on to cut out the rentiers. It wouldn’t just have a central office in the capital city, but would set up centers — something like libraries, maybe even connected to them — throughout the country to provide access to technology and public education, while building software and services to meet the needs of their communities.

Building on Hind’s vision, the social media platform could be connected to that federated network, so it aligns with the values of the country or community that builds it, but other jurisdictions can have their cooperatives shape their platform to align with their needs — while still being able to communicate with everyone else connected to the service. There’s also the possibility of setting up alliances between cooperatives on bigger projects like office software and any number of wider technological initiatives to pool resources for the collective good, whether domestically or internationally.

Internationalism would have to be a key part of this movement as well — not simply developing a new model that a small number of countries uses to extract economic returns from others, as is currently the case. In 2020, Juan Ortiz Freuler called for a digital non-aligned movement of countries in the Global South who could chart a different technological path, taking inspiration from the countries that rejected the pressure to embrace US capitalism and Soviet Communism during the Cold War. Given that some countries will have more resources, their work should be shared with — not sold to — countries with fewer resources as their public cooperatives deploy services that meet the needs of their citizens. Countries in this alliance could also share learnings from the successes and failures of their regulatory efforts to develop more effective means of reining in the existing tech monopolists.

Not all of that work will be able to happen on the local or national level though; there will need to be some degree of international governance given communications infrastructure does cross borders and exists within international waters. Inspiration could be taken from the Universal Postal Union, a UN agency that’s been around since 1874 to manage the global postal system and regulate international postage rates. A Universal Internet Union could manage the network of undersea cables that connect the world, instead of leaving it to private companies (and increasingly tech monopolists), and the transfer of public technologies and software for the common good. This would be a very different conception for how we govern the internet and the development of digital technology — but that’s exactly what we need right now.

Take back control of technology

Embracing the splinternet won’t be without its challenges. Surely, tech libertarians whose narratives have shaped how people understand the internet since its commercialization will find a slew of problems with any plan to increase the role of government — even as many of them continue not to acknowledge the role their ideas played in enabling the corporate takeover of the internet and the many problems that followed. The bigger issue comes down to incentives and economics though.

The tech policy of many of our governments is currently guided by maximizing economic returns. Even when they talk about reining in the tech monopolies, they’re usually still hesitant to challenge the deeper model that drives the industry because of all the money tech firms can pull in. Europe has been lauded for its tech regulation in recent years, but much of it has been focused on putting restrictions on US tech firms so it can raise its own exploitative national champions that may go on to command massive valuations of their own — not to challenge the underlying model. But rejecting the binary choice offered by the United States and embracing an alternative will require just that: to sacrifice economic returns in favor of democratic control and social gains.

One of the great things about such a model is how it could wrest the centralization of technological development from Silicon Valley and a small number of other hubs around the world to make it something much more democratic and aligned with public and community needs rather than the interests of venture capitalists and the stock market. In the same way that many countries have domestic media industries — often supported by public funding — a collective splinternet allows us to imagine a world where US tech monopolies are pushed out so local innovation can become a tangible goal in a way it hasn’t since Silicon Valley’s global conquest.

Is the splinternet a perfect proposal? I’m sure it has its flaws. But Silicon Valley has had too much power over how we think about and relate to technology for too long, and simply giving Shenzhen a greater hand in it isn’t the path forward. The US-China tech rivalry offers a rare opportunity for us to look clearly at the technological reality we’ve been sold and to refuse the bargain being put on the table. Instead, an alliance can be formed that imagines a very different social and technological future that tells US tech billionaires to get lost, gives countries greater sovereignty over the technological choices they make, and promotes a much more distributed approach to innovation.

Three decades into the commercialized internet, it’s time to take back control.

Within hours of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Elon Musk had inserted himself into the news cycle by providing Starlink terminals that were quickly ferried by the US military to the besieged country. Musk received great praise for his action, even as governments like those of the United States and Poland had bought many of the terminals and paid for the service being put to use by the Ukrainian army.

But by the fall, Musk’s views had shifted. A Ukrainian attempt to attack Russian forces in Crimea failed in September because its Starlink access had been disabled. In October, Ukrainian soldiers found that SpaceX had geofenced their service area, ensuring that when they got close to Russian positions in southern Ukraine they’d lose Starlink access. Musk was reportedly not only getting fed up with paying part of the cost of the service, but according to Colin Kahl, then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon who had to personally make a deferential call to the billionaire, “he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concern.” On the same call, Kahl claims Musk volunteered that he’d personally spoken to Russian president Vladimir Putin, something Musk later denied.

The Pentagon negotiated a contract with SpaceX in the months that followed to take over the cost of provisioning Starlink service, which likely also included clauses against Musk’s unilateral disabling of service. Since then, Russia has reportedly also obtained thousands of Starlink terminals that its soldiers are using, and which Musk has shown no sign of disabling. This story shows Musk is not just any old tech billionaire. He’s one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, and that’s turned him into a figure who can stand alongside world leaders and governments as their equal, and in some cases even their superior as they praise him in the hopes of gaining access to his growing empire.

Musk’s shifting preferences away from Ukraine and toward Russia are indicative of a larger shift in his politics where he’s not only been speaking out in favor of right-wing issues and echoing conspiracy theories around topics like immigration and gender, but actively seeking to build an alliance with likeminded political movements the world over. In some cases, there’s a business incentive to what Musk is doing, but it’s become increasingly clear that the relationships he’s forging are not just about getting preferential access for his companies; they're about creating a world where the political agenda he champions on Twitter is the policy of governments around the world.

Ties to the extreme right

The first key international meeting Musk had with a member of the ascendent extreme right-wing axis in global politics was in May 2022 with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Musk was officially in the country to launch Starlink, promoting it as a means to connect rural schools and increase monitoring of the Amazon. As Progressive International explained, that narrative not only helped to greenwash Starlink, but also to provide a technological cover for the cuts the Bolsonaro government had been making to environmental protection and enforcement in the rainforest. Bolsonaro also praised Musk’s plan to buy Twitter as a “fresh breath of hope.” Later that year, after Musk took over the company, he fired virtually all the company’s Brazilian staff, leaving it open to right-wing influencers who promoted false narratives about election fraud.

That meeting showed how politics and business could complement one another. Musk got a new market for Starlink and helped advance Brazil’s far-right movement. But things only accelerated from there. In June 2023, he met with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, calling himself “a fan.” Modi has been credibly called a fascist, and his Hindu nationalist movement is undertaking an unprecedented crackdown on the country’s Muslim population. Musk and Modi discussed potential uses for Starlink in India and the prospect of building a Tesla factory in India. But Musk has also allowed Twitter to become an important tool of Indian government censorship. As the Washington Post reported of Twitter months after the meeting, “A company that not long ago adopted the risky strategy of fighting government censorship in the Indian courts now consistently bends to official demands.” Those demands meant taking down posts critical of the Modi regime and removing the accounts of journalists and political opponents.

A few months later, Hungarian president Katalin Novák arrived in Texas for a tour of the Tesla Gigafactory. She hails from the same party as prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has been a central figure in the growth of illiberal right-wing populism in Europe, with a particular focus on racist anti-migrant politics and similar natalist views as Musk espouses. The meeting took place because Musk hadn’t been able to attend the Demographic Summit in Budapest the week before. Soon after, he agreed with Orbán’s criticism of European migration policies on Twitter and retweeted a post from a right-wing account called Radio Genoa that called out non-governmental organizations helping save the lives of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. “Let's hope AfD wins the elections to stop this European suicide,” the tweet read. Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a far-right German political party.

In October, Musk replied to a tweet by New Zealand’s newly elected conservative prime minister Chris Luxon, saying, “Congratulations and thank goodness!” He had just ousted the Labour Party and now leads the most right-wing government the country has seen in decades, in coalition with the libertarian ACT and nationalist NZ First parties. Musk has also intervened in the politics of his native South Africa, echoing the myth of “white genocide” spread by white nationalists to suggest Black South Africans are killing white farmers en masse, and more recently has been boosting Ireland’s far-right fringe by giving them free rein on Twitter and echoing their criticisms of the government, including on recent attempts to pass new hate speech legislation. After those interactions, Musk gave an interview to Gript, a website that promotes extreme right-wing politics.

Musk’s most recent dalliances are probably no surprise. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is quickly becoming a driving force in Europe’s tilt to the far right. She leads the Brothers of Italy, which has direct links to the country’s fascist past. In December, Musk was the main attraction at Meloni’s annual Atreju festival for conservative youth. He joined Meloni on stage to warn of “unchecked” migration, emphasize the importance of preserving the “cultural identity” of countries like Italy, dismiss climate fears as “somewhat overblown,” and tell attendees how important it was to have more children. “If people do not have children there is no new generation,” he said, which was almost exactly what the Hungarian president was quoted as telling him months before.

Back in the Americas, Musk swiftly congratulated “anarcho-capitalist” Argentine president Javier Milei when he was elected last year and praised an unhinged speech he gave at the World Economic Forum in January. Milei acted quickly to unleash “shock therapy” on Argentina, gutting public spending and making life even worse for citizens who were already struggling under the weight of soaring inflation. Musk is one of the beneficiaries of Milei’s economic deregulation, as rules were changed to allow the launch of Starlink in the South American country. Milei also confirmed that Musk is “extremely interested” in gaining access to the country’s lithium deposits.

To top it all off, Musk met with Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu in November to clean up his image after echoing an antisemitic conspiracy theory on Twitter. In exchange for his tacit support of the genocidal war in Gaza, Musk promised Israel would have a veto over any access to Starlink in the besieged enclave, including by aid organizations.

Embrace of the Republican Party

Musk’s growing relationship to the global extreme right may be concerning, but it’s not surprising. There was a time when Musk was happy to present himself as a liberal businessman aligned with some progressive priorities like fighting climate change because it meant preferential loans and various subsidies to benefit Tesla, not to mention getting Democratic backing to transform the aerospace industry in SpaceX’s favor. But those days are long gone.

It’s reasonable to believe that Musk has long held views that are more aligned with a conservative understanding of the world, and they were turbocharged as he became more radicalized during the pandemic (arguably by the very platform he now owns) and his position in society changed. No longer is he the plucky upstart challenging the big guys in the automotive and aerospace industries. SpaceX and Tesla are now powerful forces in their own right, and that means they’re subjected to higher standards of accountability. As the Democratic Party has targeted the tech industry for greater regulation and billionaires to pay higher taxes, Musk’s incentive to turn to the political right has only grown. Conservatives are not only willing to embrace him, but will eagerly defend his power just as they do with other corporate titans.

In the United States, Musk has shifted his base of operations from Democratic California to Republican Texas after being wooed by the latter’s governor Greg Abbott. He has a long-running problem with the Securities and Exchange Commission after they held him accountable for lying about having funding to take Tesla private in 2018. He’s also hidden injuries at Tesla from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, blasted the Fish and Wildlife Agency for doing environmental reviews of SpaceX’s operations in Texas, and has a history of conflicts with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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Most recently, Musk decided to have SpaceX sue the National Labor Relations Board to gut its authority, which would cause an unprecedented setback in the rights of workers across the country. That campaign is supported by the Republican Party, which Musk has been forging closer ties to in recent years. He’s explicitly backed extremist GOP candidates and told his followers to vote Republican in the 2022 primary elections. Musk now regularly scaremongers about migration across the southern US border, and even traveled to it last year to sneer at migrants with a Republican lawmaker.

In taking those actions, Musk’s business, political, and personal interests are often intertwined. He’s undoubtedly seeking to preserve his own power and grow his empire, but he’s also looking to move forward the right-wing project that he vocally advocates on Twitter and in virtually any interview he gives these days. Yet not all of his relationships are designed to move forward every one of those interests at the same time.

Mixed motivations are still dangerous

The United States is the place where Musk’s political and business interests are most closely aligned, since he lives there and his companies are based there. As Tesla and SpaceX have grown, he wants to make sure they can continue ignoring environmental and safety regulations and that his vast wealth will not be targeted by lawmakers. That creates an incentive to back the Republican Party, even beyond his political views — though it certainly helps that he agrees with them on a long list of issues. The Republicans also want to be close to the man who was lauded for so long and held up as the creator of our collective future. Seizing him for their project is politically valuable, meaning there’s mutual benefit to the alliance.

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In much of the rest of the world, right-wing movements have a similar incentive to attract Musk’s attention and support him because it boosts their profile. In some cases, those alliances are more political, like in Hungary or Italy where Musk does not have major business interests. Meanwhile, there are other instances that are much more about commercial opportunities, such as Musk’s relationship with Modi as Tesla looks to India as a future market for its products and a likely site for a factory that can make use of lower cost labor, along with Argentina’s potential to be a supplier of lithium without the problem of dealing with the left-leaning governments of Chile or Bolivia.

This is also where Musk’s relationship with China is distinct. American liberals often point to Musk’s uncritical embrace of China as evidence of his fondness for the Chinese Communist Party, but that’s a misread of the situation just as it would be for other Silicon Valley companies that have sought to break into the Chinese market. Musk built a relationship with Chinese officials because it’s a large consumer market, is ahead of the West in electric vehicle adoption, and provided low-cost manufacturing labor as he hopes to grow Tesla and export its vehicles to more markets.

Does Musk like the labor discipline and dependability that comes with a lack of Western democracy? Undoubtedly. But he doesn’t have the approach to Xi Jinping as he does with Giorgia Meloni or other members of the extreme right-wing axis. Politically, Musk is much more interested in making sure Western countries align with his values, while other parts of the world are seen through more of an economic lens. Musk approaches India like he does China: whether Modi is fascist or not is of little concern, as long as he can access its market and cheap labor on good terms. If that requires letting Modi’s government censor Twitter to make him happy, then so be it.

Ultimately, Musk is not alone in this. He’s just the most visible Silicon Valley leader to have openly embraced white nationalism and far-right politics to defend the power and wealth he accumulated since the internet’s privatization in the 1990s. It helps that the right-wing views many tech CEOs and investors advocate have a long history in the tech sector, but more than anything they’re concerned with cementing their positions at any cost. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was quite explicit about it in last year’s techno-optimist manifesto where he cited numerous far-right thinkers, including the Italian Futurists that supported Meloni’s forebears. If fascism rises again, that’s perfectly fine with the titans of tech, as long as they get to hold onto their influence.

The United States is flirting with a TikTok ban again.

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a bill that sounds absolutely ridiculous and would allow the president to designate non-US social media apps as national security threats. If they’re hit with that label, they have six months to make sure they have no ties to a US adversary, which means a country like China or Iran. If they don’t follow through, they’d be banned from app stores and web hosting services, effectively cutting them off in the United States.

If the bill makes it through the Senate, is passed into law, and the president issues a designation to TikTok, that means its parent company ByteDance would have to sell it or risk having it being banned. A total ban still feels unlikely, but the United States flexing its muscle in this way should prompt a deeper examination of the ties that bind Silicon Valley and Washington, DC. For decades, the tech industry wanted to appear in opposition to government power, but the truth is that the global expansion of US tech was always a project of US geopolitical ambition.

A mutually beneficial arrangement

Imagine if some random country — let’s say Canada — passed a law tomorrow saying that Facebook or Google had to divest from US ownership or it would be blocked in the country within 180 days. After Facebook refused to abide by a local regulation to pay news publishers last year, some retaliation might be warranted. But putting that aside, how would the United States react? Its government would be furious — and it already is about lesser transgressions against its tech companies.

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Take, for example, when Canada regulated streaming platforms last year so they’d have to show a bit more Canadian content to Canadian viewers. The US embassy was not happy about it. It also got angry when the Canadian government announced plans to move forward with a digital services tax targeting US tech companies, which it considered necessary because the United States has spent years stalling a global tax treaty aimed at making US tech multinationals pay more tax in the countries they operate, not just where they’re headquartered.

Even though the domestic discourse in the United States has shifted in recent years with more concern over monopolistic practices, the US government and Silicon Valley are still on the same page about the role US tech plays internationally. Back when US lawmakers were preparing to commercialize the internet, they were explicit that their intention was to use it to expand the country’s geopolitical influence. As internet “inventor” and then Senator Al Gore told the Senate in 1989, “the nation which most completely assimilates high-performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century.” The United States wanted to win the race — and dominate everyone else in the process.

In The Promise of Access, Daniel Greene says the US government saw the internet as “an instrument of soft power,” especially in post-Soviet states that were emerging from communism. But it was also a great market opportunity. As internet access expanded globally, US companies got a head start (along with a massive influx of investment to accelerate their growth) as they planted their flags in international markets before foreign competitors could rise up to challenge them. And once they had the scale that came with global operations, it was easy to crush virtually any foreign upstart.

As Silicon Valley embarked on its global conquest, the United States supported it the entire way. Like in the Canadian examples, US diplomats are always ready to help their tech companies in international markets. Documents that leaked in 2022 showed how US ambassadors in France and the Netherlands had directly intervened to help Uber’s rollout in those countries, as it underpriced its service to push out local competitors and sought to steamroll local regulations. The United States also had problems with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and is currently trying to negotiate the ability to exempt firms from an international treaty on the responsible use of AI.

This is a common tactic for the United States. Last year, Senator Elizabeth Warren called out how her own government negotiates protections for US tech companies in international trade deals. She cited how the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement placed limitations on those governments’ ability to regulate cross-border data flows and review source code, and how companies are lobbying for similar provisions to be inserted in the 14-country Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. In 2019, the New York Times reported they’d also been included in a deal with Japan and were being pushed by US diplomats in negotiations with the European Union, the United Kingdom, and members of the World Trade Organization.

Those specific rules designed to limit governments’ ability to regulate the tech sector came together in the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership under the Obama administration, and were continued under the Trump presidency. “Such rules open a Pandora’s box of issues for achieving public policy goals such as protecting privacy, competition, social and economic justice, and sustainable development,” explains lawyer Burcu Kilic in a study for the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

China’s tech success

The United States’ diplomatic advocacy for the tech industry and the broader system of liberalized international trade it fought for in the latter half of the twentieth century have been immensely beneficial to Silicon Valley. Not only could US tech companies easily spread their products around the world without worrying too much about local regulation, but foreign governments were constrained whenever they tried to respond lest they run afoul of international trade rules. That meant that as Silicon Valley firms took over international markets, local governments had few tools to stop them or to promote local competitors in their place.

In Western discourses, China’s internet policies are often positioned solely as attempts to limit the freedoms of Chinese people — and that can be part of the motivation — but it’s a politically convenient explanation for Western governments that ignores the more important economic dimension of its protectionist approach. Chinese tech is the main competitor to Silicon Valley’s dominance today because China limited the ability of US tech to take over the Chinese market, similar to how Japan and South Korea protected their automotive and electronics industries in the decades after World War II. That gave domestic firms the time they needed to develop into rivals that could compete not just within China, but internationally as well. And that’s exactly why the United States is so focused not just on China’s rising power, but how its tech companies are cutting into the global market share of US tech giants.

As digital services and tech hardware made by Chinese companies displaces those made by US firms, it also affects the power and influence of the United States. The US government exaggerates the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the operation of ByteDance and other Chinese tech companies, while downplaying the power it wields over its own tech firms. It’s as if they expect us to forget the Snowdon revelations about the vast surveillance apparatus developed by US intelligence agencies and the cooperation they received from US tech companies. Not to mention how US agencies buy their own citizens’ data from the same data brokers the Chinese government could use if it wanted to — all without TikTok being on people’s phones. Even Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen spoke openly about the counterespionage work done by the company in the interest of US national security when she testified before Congress in 2021.

The United States used to be firmly opposed to any attempt to restrict the free flow of information technology because it benefited US companies that were dominating global markets. It’s been changing its tune in recent years not because its convictions have changed, but because the real guiding principles were always misunderstood. The global spread of the internet was framed by US lawmakers and tech capitalists as being synonymous with the spread of freedom and democracy — concepts the United States loves to wrap itself in — when it was really about geopolitics and economic power. Now that those goals are threatened, it’s happy to embrace bans to protect its interests, while pressuring its allies to back them and, by extension, accept the position of US tech firms within their economies.

But as US power slowly declines, it’s not guaranteed that will work. Western allies may be broadly on side with many of the restrictions the United States has been placing on the Chinese tech sector, but much of the rest of the world is not — and many of those countries are growing much faster than Europe and North America. Meanwhile, US attempts to thwart China’s technological rise don’t seem to be working as planned. Despite the restrictions on access to chip technology, China is pouring billions into the sector and already starting to see tangible results.

The US is protecting its power

When US lawmakers discuss their plans for a TikTok ban, they often talk about it as a national security threat — that it will allow China, through ByteDance, to get access to US data and information — but as I’ve already outlined, that’s not a strong argument. It overestimates China’s ability and desire to use ByteDance to that end, and ignores how the Chinese government has much easier ways to get that data without compromising one of its own tech giants.

There’s also a suggestion that lawmakers are trying to curb the spread of pro-Palestine sentiment as Israel’s genocidal campaign continues and other content critical of the United States. While I’m sure some of the gerontocrats that govern the country are incensed to hear those stories in the media or from lobbyists — and maybe even falsely believe the CCP is pulling the algorithmic strings — the primary reason behind this latest push is still to protect US power and defend its tech industry. Congress isn’t seriously pursuing a federal privacy law, restrictions on data brokers, or regulations that would cover all social media companies doing what it accuses TikTok of doing — it’s just singling out one (Chinese) company.

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An interview with Antony Loewenstein on the Hamas attack, the brutal Israeli response, and the wider context of the conflict

DisconnectParis Marx

Just as the prospect of antitrust action against the titans of Silicon Valley started gaining traction in Washington, DC, the hysteria around China emerged as a key issue — and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. After finally coming in for some scrutiny, the tech industry had to find a bigger threat if it was going to protect itself. China was the perfect target. Facebook paid for an astroturf campaign to set the groundwork for the turn against TikTok to protect its control over social media, and the industry more broadly saw that if Chinese tech companies could be presented as a geopolitical problem, it would mean their monopolistic practices could be positioned as a necessary evil to counter that competition.

Silicon Valley has a long history of working with the US military, but the ties it has to the Pentagon today might still be surprising to someone watching the industry ten years ago. As the “New Cold War” rhetoric has gone into high gear, tech companies have been eager to get their own lucrative military contracts or government subsidies to develop new defense tech, find new ways to use AI to wage war, or help boost key industries like chip manufacturing. In short, positioning China as a geopolitical threat has been a boon for the tech industry, and any morals they once claimed to have are out the window as they cash in.

An end to US tech dominance

The global spread of the internet and dominance of the US tech industry that followed it also coincided with the United States’ several decades of global hegemony. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no other country that could challenge US power and it took full advantage by increasing its economic influence and, let’s be honest, launching a ton of unnecessary wars with disastrous consequences we’re still living with today. Now, as we transition toward a more multipolar world with other countries carving out regional spheres of influence, it’s not surprising that the “open” internet — meaning a US-dominated internet — is facing serious challenges.

The digital revolution has failed

The benefits of the internet are eroding. The AI boom is only accelerating their demise.

DisconnectParis Marx

Maybe you’re an American and you think the TikTok ban makes sense. Sure, US tech companies can track virtually everything you (and people in many countries outside the US) do, will hand that data over to the government, and even sell it to a ton of data brokers — but at least they’re US companies. Chinese ones shouldn’t be allowed to do the same thing, at least to US residents. That line of thinking makes no sense to me, but I can see how people only thinking of their own narrow national interests can believe it.

But why should a Canadian, a European, a Brazilian, a South Korean, or people from any number of other countries outside the United States defend that reality or find it in any way acceptable? When previous forms of media like radio, film, or television and communications technologies like the telephone rolled out, countries often placed rules on foreign ownership and content distribution, but with the internet little of that was allowed. Countries were expected to accept US dominance of the new medium, yet now we see what happens when those US firms start to face real competition at home: the US government does exactly what it long said no one else was allowed to do and protects its domestic industry.

Whatever happens with the TikTok ban, it’s time to reconsider the myths that have been built up about the internet and digital technology that were designed to serve the interests of US tech companies. China is in the crosshairs today because it’s the only country that’s developed a domestic tech industry that can really give Silicon Valley a run for its money. Should the rest of the world, or even just Western countries, really be expected to accept the dominance of Facebook, Amazon, and Google in perpetuity? Instead of defending US tech companies from Chinese competition, we must work toward a vision of an internet (and a world) that rejects the dominance of either.

On April 4, 1968, when I learned with the rest of the world that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, I immediately thought that the civil rights movement, which King had led, had just been set back by fifty years. I was wrong about that. It ended right then (check that last link). Almost fifty-six years have passed since that assassination, and the cause still has a long way to go: far longer than what MLK and the rest of us had imagined before he was killed.

Also, since MLK was the world’s leading activist for peace and nonviolence, those movements were set back as well. (Have they moved? How much? I don’t have answers. Maybe some of you do.)

I was twenty years old when MLK and RFK were killed, and a junior at Guilford College, a Quaker institution in Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro was a hotbed of civil rights activism and strife at the time (and occasionally since). I was an activist of sorts back then as well, both for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. But being an activist, and having moral sympathies of one kind or another, are far less effective in the absence of leadership than they are when leadership is there, and strong.

 Alexei Navalny was one of those leaders. He moved into the past tense today: (1976-2024). His parentheses closed in an Arctic Russian prison. He was only 47 years old. At age 44 he was poisoned—an obvious assassination attempt—and survived, thanks to medical treatment in Germany. He was imprisoned in 2021 after he returned to Russia, and… well, you can read the rest here. Since Navalny was the leading advocate of reform in Russia and opposed Vladimir Putin’s one-man rule of the country, Putin wanted him dead. So now Navalny is gone, and with it much hope of reform.

Not every assassination is motivated by those opposed to a cause. Some assassins are just nuts. John Hinkley Jr. and Mark David Chapman, for example. Hinkley failed to kill Ronald Reagan, and history moved right along. But Chapman succeeded in killing John Lennon, and silence from that grave has persisted ever since.

My point is that assassination works. For causes a leader personifies, the setbacks can be enormous, and in some cases total, or close enough, for a long time.

I hope Alexei Navalny’s causes will still have effects in his absence. Martyrdom in some ways works too. But I expect those effects to take much longer to come about than they would if Navalny were still alive. And I would love to be wrong about that.