National Security Needs a Voice in Big Tech Breakup Talks: Negroponte
Congressional discussions about regulating or breaking up Big Tech are focused heavily around antitrust issues and wrongly ignore national security implications, former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said Wednesday in a CCIA/Foreign Policy webinar Wednesday. Any such legislation needs a…
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robust review of national security implications before it's adopted, said Klon Kitchen, American Enterprise Institute resident fellow. Those Big Tech discussions suffer from "a problem of process," with the Senate Judiciary Committee taking the lead with national security input being omitted from the discussion, said Negroponte, now vice chairman of international trade consultancy McLarty Associates. He was among former national security officials signatories last fall to a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., warning about national security implications of some antitrust bills aimed at Big Tech. Negroponte said talk of breaking up Big Tech ignores the utility of scale, with tech giants more able to put billions into research into developing capabilities like quantum computing, AI and robotics. Big Tech being big "is not ... ipso facto bad," and breaking up Big Tech would disadvantage U.S. companies versus their foreign company rivals, he said. Legislation that would bar self-preferencing by Big Tech could end up hurting consumers, Kitchen said, pointing to Google using user-base insights to help preempt phishing attacks on Gmail uses, Kitchen said. "That's precisely the type of unintended consequences that need to be considered," he said. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S-2992/HR-3816) would curb self-preferencing. The tech that drives both national economies and military capabilities is coming largely out of the private sector for commercial purposes, with the private sector disrupting the national security burden born by governments, Kitchen said. While the U.S. response is for government to work collaboratively with industry, nations like China have fused their private sector and government together, directing both at state aims, he said. He said breaking up companies puts limits on their ability to innovate. He said it's not coincidental the companies operating at the greatest scale are driving emerging tech like AI. He said startups are able to be agile because of underlying capabilities and datasets that come from big incumbents and pointed to Google's TensorFlow machine learning platform.