That warning, however dark, didn't quite capture the emerging strategy of these firms a strategy that was in fact taking shape before the pandemic began or the graver threat they pose. Rather than supplanting government, they have, in essence, sought to merge with it.
Tech executives didn't always yearn to work in league with government. During their years of wild growth and political immaturity, the tech companies sounded like teenagers encountering Ayn Rand for the first time. Like John Galt, the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged, they muttered about the evils of government and how it kept down great innovators. This view of the world smacked of self-interest. Companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook wanted to avoid the sorts of regulatory controls that constrained their older, more established competitors.
But if self-interest neatly aligned with idealism, the idealism was real. Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, a refugee from the former Soviet Union, warned about the moral costs of the company's foray into China. He styled himself a purist, and the company's experience in the country ultimately illustrated the logic of his stance: despite abiding by the dictates of the regime, Google was breached by Chinese hackers, who attempted to steal its intellectual property and peer into the Gmail accounts of human rights activists. In 2010, after four years of operating on the mainland, Google decamped to Hong Kong.
Across the industry, distrust of the state prevailed and not just of the authoritarian state. In 2016, Apple famously refused the FBI's request to crack the password of a dead terrorist's iPhone. "We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the US government," CEO Tim Cook wrote in an open letter explaining his company's defiant stance.
But as idealistic companies age, they start to reconsider the principles of their youth. And the major tech firms can no longer plausibly pass as plucky start-ups. An anti-monopoly movement, with adherents on both the left and the right, has been slowly rising.
Microsoft boss Satya Nadella: The challenges we face demand an unprecedented alliance between business and government.Louie Douvis
When Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the Senate in 2018, he pre-emptively conceded, "I think the real question as the internet becomes more important in people's lives is what is the right regulation, not whether there should be [regulation] or not." The statement was an acknowledgment of the zeitgeist. Big tech stood accused of spreading disinformation, profiteering from its trade in private data, and contributing to an epidemic of teenage anxiety.
Zuckerberg invited government oversight, but not because he had been chastened. In the past, when the public has grown suspicious of corporate behemoths, those companies have entered into a grand bargain: in exchange for government protection of their monopoly, the firms will abide by the dictates of the state. That's why, in the 1910s, the visionary AT&T president Theodore Vail famously submitted his company to invasive regulation. This allowed him to preserve its dominance for generations.
Zuckerberg, too, welcomes new rules, so long as they can be shaped to Facebook's advantage. And Facebook is indeed busy shaping regulation to its advantage. Last year, it spent roughly $US17 million ($24 million) on lobbying more than any other tech company.
This same basic logic led Amazon to plant its second headquarters in Washington DC, and it has led companies such as Google and Microsoft to build relationships with the intelligence community. Eminences from these companies sit on official boards that counsel the US government about how to upgrade its computing prowess. It is telling that the nastiest internecine fight among the tech firms involves a $US10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Department of Defence.
As the pandemic accelerates big tech's insinuation into government affairs, the industry's most powerful companies will almost certainly exploit their relationships with agencies to damage less powerful rivals and extract lucrative contracts. But the companies will also provide valuable information and services to their Washington clients, increasing the government's powers, for good and for ill.
President Donald Trump insists that his handling of the pandemic has been a success, but the government is desperately aware of its shortcomings. It wants tests but can't procure enough of them. It needs contact tracing but has struggled to build a system to handle that. More than anything, it needs an aura of competence to cover for its flailing efforts. As the nation awaits a vaccine, the government may have no choice but to rely on big tech to compensate for its gaps in ability and expertise.
Such a collaboration would be worrying under any circumstances, but it is terrifying in the Trump era. This administration has low regard for the principles of liberal democracy, and a penchant for looking longingly at the powers available to autocrats. And we know what an autocracy powered by information technology can achieve.
China's tech industry has helped construct an advanced surveillance state beyond George Orwell's imaginative capacities. Technology companies practice the science of exploiting data to alter human behaviour ideal for a state eager to engineer the loyalty of its people. China's nascent social-credit system maintains a running tally of "good" behaviour. The ratings are the basis for rewards and punishments.
A citizen can lose the right to travel if he is caught jaywalking or playing music too loud. Private firms have assessed creditworthiness based on such metrics. According to Wired, "The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be trailed by a file compiling data from public and private sources" that can be pulled up by a fingerprint or other biometric information.
The US, of course, is a long way off from such a system. Even so, past crises can be read as an instruction manual for how to make the most of an atmosphere of anxiety and trauma. A year before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Federal Trade Commission issued a report recommending robust legislation restricting the corporate use of online data which would have included a right to correct (or delete) personal information. But the terrorist attacks scrambled the national calculus. Security took priority over other considerations: The nation quickly acculturated itself to omnipresent CCTV cameras, body scanners in airports, and a drastic extension of powers to opaque government agencies.
In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues that this atmosphere allowed Google and Facebook to emerge as powerhouses. By eroding concern for privacy, the terrorist attacks established the conditions that gave these companies the latitude to plunder personal data. In a meaningful sense, the fears of that moment gave birth to the dystopian realities of this one.
Now, according to the non-profit Privacy International, at least 27 countries have begun using mobile phone data to track the spread of the coronavirus. The Washington Post has reported that more than two dozen governments are testing software called Fleming, developed by the Israeli firm NSO. The participation of NSO does not inspire confidence. Amnesty International has accused the firm of making spyware that states have used to monitor human rights activists and other nettlesome dissidents, including, allegedly, the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
We are concerned that some 'solutions' to the crisis may, via mission creep allow unprecedented surveillance of society at large.
Open letter signed by more than 300 European scientists and privacy scholars
Google and Apple are not NSO. They remember the backlash visited on the companies that Edward Snowden exposed in 2013 as having worked with the National Security Agency. Rather than giving the government exactly the data it craves, they have tried to dictate the terms of the partnership and posed as the guardian of civil liberties.
They have designed their COVID-19 alert system to prevent the centralised collection of data and promised that the system will disappear with the disease. (It should be noted, however, that a primary reason for their reluctance to track everything the government wants tracked is that they don't want to drain the batteries of their customers' phones.) Over time, Google and Apple will probably face growing pressure to surveil COVID-19 patients just as closely as they follow those who use their maps.
As tech and government grow more comfortable with each other, they will face the temptation to further indulge their shared worst instincts. Both wield intrusive powers with inconsistent regard for the prerogatives of privacy. Both possess a not-so-humble sense that they can change public behaviour. Even some academics who have praised Google and Apple's system have issued a stark warning. More than 300 European scientists and privacy scholars signed an open letter stating: "We are concerned that some solutions' to the crisis may, via mission creep allow unprecedented surveillance of society at large."
Without new constraints, this emerging alliance could grow more imperious than the apparatus that appeared after September 11, 2001. In the decades since those attacks, the smartphone has become a universal fact of modern existence, a repository of sensitive thoughts, candid photographs and closely guarded secrets.
One lesson from China is that partnerships between the state and powerful tech companies must be kept shallow at best. The US government should create a Data Protection Agency, modelled after the ones in Europe and empowered to scrutinise how these companies exploit the information that flows through their devices and platforms. And instead of treating Silicon Valley as the senior partner in the relationship, the government should use its clout to impose a moratorium on tech mergers, preserving the possibility of a competitive marketplace on the other side of the virus.
In the years after World War II, such constraints would have been considered commonsense. A bipartisan antitrust consensus was built, in part, on the memory of German conglomerates such as Siemens, Krupp and IG Farben, which had cheerfully acceded to the rise of fascism and handsomely profited from it.
For the people of that generation, monopolies were less a menace to the consumer than to democracy. They were convinced that a symbiosis of concentrated economic power and concentrated political power was a path to fascism. Those warnings should also haunt the construction of the post-COVID-19 order. A world where monopoly exists in coalition with the only force more powerful than itself can never be healthy, even if it is no longer ill.
Atlantic
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What Big Tech wants out of the pandemic - The Australian Financial Review