September 14, 2022
Liberal senator James Paterson has warned the Biden administration against burdening big tech companies with onerous regulation, urging Western governments to forge a “new compact” with Silicon Valley to maintain their rapidly waning technological edge over China.
In a speech in Washington on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), Senator Paterson said China was bound to overtake the US in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and “green tech” unless the US harnessed the financial firepower and resources of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the other tech titans.
“Whether we like it or not, big tech companies are geopolitical actors and Western governments cannot out-spend and out-innovate [China] without them.
“It will either be Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon who set the international rules of the road or it will be Tencent, ByteDance, Huawei and HikVision,” he said.
“Nothing less than the survival of liberal democracies and the free enterprise system depends on it,” he said, noting China was already spending 90 per cent of the US spend on R&D and was on track to surpass it by decade’s end.
Senator Paterson’s comments at the American Enterprise Institute came days after the Biden administration welcomed congressional efforts to clip big tech’s dominance, including through anti-trust enforcement and changing “section 230”, a critical part of a US law that shields tech platforms from liability.
“A small number of dominant internet platforms use their power to exclude market entrants, to engage in rent-seeking, and gather intimate personal information they can use for their own advantage,” the White House said on Thursday.
Alphabet, which owns Google, contributed 70 per cent of total US commercial R&D expenditure in 2019, spending a combined $US140bn in comparison to the Pentagon’s $US109bn, Senator Paterson said. “Despite our many legitimate frustrations with our own tech titans, we do have to choose whether we want them to prevail in their competition with their counterparts in authoritarian countries”.
Klon Kitchen, a senior fellow in defence technology at the AEI, said “a level of pragmatism” was bound to break through the “high level of distrust” on both sides of politics in the California-based tech giants, given the bipartisan agreement on the technological threat China posed to the US.
Democrats have criticised the tech platforms for spreading disinformation and misinformation and their economic dominance, while Republicans have grown critical of them for censorship and alleged political bias.
“The top five tech companies spend more annually on R&D than the defence department does, there’s simply no way we can out-Google these companies,” Mr Kitchen said.
The Biden administration is poised to announce a ban on shipments of certain semiconductors to China in coming weeks, according to reports.
