Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg shoots himself in the foot so often you wonder he can walk. But this time is extreme – he’s apparently helped convince Trump that Tik Tok and other Chinese-owned apps are dangerous and need to be banned.
Trump, never an analytical thinker and open to anything that
he sees helping with re-election, has responded with bans on a number of
Chinese-owned apps.
The official Trumpian reasoning is that, because the apps
are controlled by a dangerous foreign nation, they could be used for nefarious
purposes.
Hmmm. Remembering that what’s “foreign” depends on where you live, and that a lot of countries see the US, especially under Trump, as recklessly dangerous, where else might this principle apply?
Might Facebook, which gathers far more personal data than
Tik Tok, be vulnerable in Europe and Asia? What about another big American
software company, Oracle, whose servers run at the heart of all kinds of
international government and business operations?
Isn’t it problematic for the US to suggest banning foreign
apps when we make most of the world’s software?
Consider the worldwide dominance of Microsoft’s Windows and
Office 365, Apple’s IOS, Google’s Android, Chrome and Search, Amazon’s AWS,
Oracle’s databases, and much, much, more. All of these are far closer to critical
infrastructure and have far greater ability to hide dangerous malware than a
frivolous cellphone app.
With his Tik Tok decision, Trump is setting a precedent that
will provide governments around the world with a clear and powerful rationale
for not buying foreign software. Unfortunately, in nearly all cases that will
mean not buying American.
The precedent becomes more powerful when you remember Trump
isn’t alleging Tik Tok is dangerous, he’s merely saying it could
be.
Once other nations accept Trump’s arguments and decide
foreign software is potentially dangerous, America is doubly vulnerable. In
addition to the ubiquity of our products, there’s the fact that this country is
increasingly seen as an unstable and unreliable partner. Four years of Trump is
evidence of that, but Bush’s launch of the Iraq War also provoked intense skepticism
about American stability.
Many governments and opposition politicians around the world
use Facebook for official communications. Will that continue? Or, will the EU and
nations in other regions follow the path of Russia and China and establish
their own version of the American social network? If foreign software is
dangerous, the path seems obvious.
Also, it’s certain that those who have argued for a
non-American alternative to things like Oracle-based servers will be more than
emboldened by the US action. Thanks to Trump, their arguments are now validated
and the necessary investment in alternatives now justified. Whether his bid
wins or lose, Oracle’s CEO, a Trump backer, should be worried. And so should
all of the company’s employees.
And, employing an easy extension of the Trump-Zuckerberg
“thinking,” what about American-managed consulting companies that often
undertake confidential work for governments around the world? It’s “look out”
time for McKinsey, Accenture, and others.
The risk from Tik Tok as a foreign app on cell phones is by
any matter of logic minor and manageable. But choosing to follow the Trump-Zuckerberg
path of turning a software molehill into a national security mountain will have
very serious consequences for the American economy. Change won’t happen
instantly, but within a decade sharply narrowed markets could cost the US
economy hundreds of billions of dollars of export income and on the order of a
million jobs. It will be a tough blow for ordinary Americans who will pay more
in income taxes to replace lost corporate income.
It’s the price we’ll
pay for leaving decisions to a short-sighted CEO who wants to divert scrutiny from
his many privacy missteps and a low-IQ politician who wants to distract the
public from his cornucopia of failures.
