The gusto with which Donald Trump’s administration has begun dismantling the rules-based order the world has operated under for so long has led to some bewildering headlines. Alliances with friendly nations have been upturned. The whole concept of free trade has been jettisoned as eye-watering tariffs are used as a form of blackmail.
Once unwavering confidence in Silicon Valley’s innovation is turning to scepticism. It is most evident in the form of Tesla-badged electric cars going from trendy status symbols to expensive liabilities, thanks to Elon Musk embedding himself so fully in the Trump administration.
Musk’s team of nerdy analysts have delved into the source code that runs the US government as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s work, obliterating data privacy norms in the public sector.
Nations are now questioning whether the Starlink satellite broadband network, another of Musk’s creations, can be relied on to reliably deliver essential telecommunication connectivity. Talks between the Italian government and Starlink over a plan to create a €1.5 billion service to provide secure satellite communications to government workers have stalled due to security concerns over Trump’s increasingly frosty relationship with European allies in the Nato alliance.
When Australia sought a satellite partner for its national broadband network, it opted to bypass Starlink, albeit in favour of another US provider, Amazon Kuiper, part of Jeff Bezos’s tech empire.
In Europe, which has some of the strongest data protection laws in the world, businesses are questioning whether it’s still appropriate to have all of their data residing on cloud computing infrastructure owned and operated by the big three American hosts – Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google.
These concerns intensified after Trump levelled sanctions against the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which relies heavily on Microsoft Azure cloud technology.
For years, most Western countries have been enthusiastic buyers of American technology, benefiting from the innovation of Silicon Valley. Our own government has a “cloud-first” policy in place which has led to services and data moving to cloud platforms. The big US providers scooped up the lion’s share of that business. US legislation in the form of the Cloud Act allows law enforcement agencies including the FBI to subpoena user data from tech companies, including data that’s stored on infrastructure out of the US.
We are effectively sleepwalking into a passive ‘technology taker’ relationship with US technology companies.
The concern now is that Trump will use that power in a data grab that serves his interests. European calls for digital sovereignty are accelerating. The website European Alternatives lists digital service providers based in the EU for consumers and businesses wanting to decouple from US tech.
Doing so isn’t a realistic option for New Zealand in the near term, so embedded is the US tech stack in our economy. But Christchurch futurist Ben Reid, in his book Fast Forward Aotearoa, makes a compelling argument for starting the process of breaking free of the technofeudalism that has seen us become almost completely reliant on US technology, sacrificing our digital sovereignty in the process.
He says we are “effectively sleepwalking into a passive ‘technology taker’ relationship with US technology companies which will be nearly impossible to extract ourselves from later on”.
What’s the answer? Considering open source software options and local tech providers for critical digital infrastructure. That can extend to artificial intelligence platforms, which are currently dominated by US companies.
We could work with the Europeans and other like-minded nations to develop digital services and infrastructure rather than just take what US companies serve. Trump’s tactics may provide the impetus for us to become tech makers rather than subservient takers.
