Rise of Techno-Nationalism

During Donald Trump’s tenure, there was a big fight between the US and China about Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment (and smartphone) manufacturer. The West was worried that if Huawei equipment grabbed the largest share of the upcoming 5G market, then China could insert malware and spyware in telecom networks all over the world…

 

The West would know. As Anirudh Suri writes in The Great Tech Game, in the 19th and 20th centuries, Britain had the monopoly over “telegraph communication network” across the world. Progressively, physical infrastructure monopoly had resulted in a monopoly over the raw materials needed for telegraph cables. As Britain became the #1 player in telegraph systems, it was cheaper and more economical for other countries to use British systems. With ever larger systems under their control, British expertise at laying cables and repairing these systems became better. It had become a circle that reinforced British dominance over telegraph systems across the world.

 

In 1914, when World War I started, Britain immediately “cut Germany’s telegraphic cables”. It’s not as if Germany (or Japan and France) didn’t see the risk of being at Britain’s mercy on all matters telegraph. But building alternate telegraph systems takes time and money. In fact, says Suri, it was this fear of the British dominance of cables that drove the “infant technology of radio into early adolescence” and adoption.

 

Likewise, says Suri:

“The telegraph, much like the Internet, was not initially envisioned as a geopolitical tool.”

Today, we have more and more countries who asks these questions about the Internet:

“The real conversation and analysis have to be around questions such as: Who is building and benefiting from the digital infrastructure? Who has the ability to cut off the digital access to certain regions? Who owns the technology underlying most of today’s technological advancements? Who owns the immense amount of data being generated every second and the insight that can be derived from that? Who derives or extracts the most value from the new digital value chains?”

 

Suri calls this trend “techno-nationalism”, which includes digital sovereignty and data sovereignty. On this front, he says India is closer to China’s view than the US’s view. Both countries do not want the value of the data from their regions to be reaped by “foreign powers” (aka America). The EU, while not going the China/India way, is not thrilled by all the data going to American companies either – hence the EU’s focus on privacy laws. One thing more and more countries have in common thus is that they do not want the value of the data coming from them to be going to the “Big Tech firms that call the US their home”.

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