America’s national security environment has changed dramatically since 1975, when I graduated from West Point and the most immediate threat America faced was Warsaw Pact tanks poised to roll across the West German border. As Russia’s savage assault on Ukrainian democracy has demonstrated, America’s enemies will still resort to conventional warfare when it serves their ends, and we must be prepared to respond in kind. But less obvious, yet equally menacing threats to our citizens and our democracy have emerged since 1975: terrorism and asymmetrical warfare, misinformation, cyberwarfare, and attacks on our electoral system. These lethal challenges must be met not with powerful weapons but with creative thinking and dynamic technology that allows us to detect threats and opportunities and move almost instantaneously to defeat them.
But our ability to meet these threats and seize these opportunities is jeopardized by the chokehold a handful of companies have on the American technology sector. Protected by an antiquated antitrust regime, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google increasingly use their immense size not to build the sort of new technology needed to grow the economy and strengthen our cyber defenses, but to smother and bleed the next generation of innovative firms. And, by doing business with our fiercest geopolitical rivals, they both strengthen competing economies and risk the unauthorized transfer of data and technology to hostile regimes.
This is why I join Senators Amy Klobuchar, Chuck Grassley and allies on both sides of the aisle in support of S.2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. This legislation will restore competition to America’s technology sector by preventing dominant digital platforms from abusing their market power to crush competitors, keep new innovations from ever coming to market, bleed online businesses, and limit consumer choice.
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