Continual State of Conflict: Big Tech and the Soft War
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.
The global corporations whose harmful actions would be addressed by this legislation have offered up an ocean’s worth of often-contradictory red herrings as they fight to maintain their market power: that the legislation unfairly targets only the largest tech enterprises or that it will hinder the growth of smaller companies; that it will limit consumer choice or that it will confuse consumers with too many choices; that it will stifle competition; and that it will empower overseas competitors.
But as someone who has dedicated his adult life to fighting for and thinking about America’s national security, the argument that seems most specious to me is that re-introducing competition into the technology sector will disfavor American firms compared to tech firms based in adversarial nations; that our national security requires a massive wall of near-monopolies in critical technology sectors.
In fact, this Maginot Line mentality has it exactly backwards.
The leaders of companies like Facebook and Amazon — which were founded in a dorm room and a garage, respectively — know better than anyone that small, agile, visionary firms drive innovation, not sluggish behemoths whose growth is driven by acquisition — Amazon has acquired more than 100 competitors — or monopoly pricing, as when Apple charges independent developers a 30 per cent commission on downloads and in-app purchases through the Apple Store.
The creative approaches that define young firms are particularly important when it comes to containing dangerous disinformation spread by an agile and sophisticated global network of troll farms committed to sowing confusion and interfering with our elections. S.2992, by ensuring a more level playing field so these small and innovative firms can take root in a fair competitive environment, will allow them to better attract financing and reach customers, to grow our economy and to make the United States a more secure nation.
Big Tech has another problem. They do business in countries that are America’s adversaries. And often, when doing business in these countries, company’s interests in revenue and profits conflict with America’s national security interests, a conflict that profit always seems to win.
Apple has expressed a willingness to do whatever it takes to have access to cheap Chinese labor and the Chinese consumer market. They store terabytes of Chinese consumer data on servers owned by state-owned firms. Apple’s Tim Cook even made a deal worth a reported $275 billion to help boost China’s economy.
Amazon gives Apple one better — or one worse — boosting profits by using forced labor for production of its hardware and AmazonBasics line. And while the company is committed to fighting social injustice in America, they pursued an entirely different strategy in China, cooperating with the propaganda arm of the Chinese government to limit any criticism of President Xi Jingping, in a move those involved described to Reuters as “helping to further the ruling Communist party’s global and economic political agenda.”
And, as Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv, Vladimir Putin’s cyber commandos flooded Facebook and Google’s YouTube with hours of the purest Russian propaganda, garnering millions of likes, comments and shares.
This is not to argue that American firms should be restricted from doing business in China. Several of these dominant tech companies, however, are almost dependent on the Chinese, and have proven that they are willing to bend to the CCP’s wishes. However, I am more comfortable entrusting our national security to companies whose conflicts of interest are not so obvious. And the entire history of capitalism teaches us that it is young, hungry companies — like these Big Tech companies at their founding — that drive innovation and economic growth, not the monopolists of today. An economic environment in which young companies and innovative technology can thrive is vital to American security in an age of soft power. S.2992 will help create the environment in which such companies can thrive.
Major General (U.S. Army retired) James A. “Spider” Marks served more than 30 years in service to nation holding every command position from infantry platoon leader to commanding general and was the senior intelligence officer in the Los Angeles riots, the Balkans, Korea, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is an honor graduate of the U.S. Army Ranger School, a national security contributor to CNN and member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
