Tuesday, September 24, 2024

STOP MAKING BIG TECH THE ENEMY

 

Stop Making Big Tech the Enemy

We're in a critical fight to stay ahead of China and India in A.I., yet our government and its regulators keep targeting the companies that are critical to winning. It's time we all played on the same team. 


Expert Opinion By Howard Tullman, General managing partner, G2T3V and Chicago High Tech Investors @howardtullman1

Sep 24, 2024

Election years are notorious for cheap stunts, useless hearings and the annually recurrent attacks on the tech and pharmaceutical industries. There's no lower-hanging fruit for these pointless pontificators than Big Bad Tech, and Big Pharma isn't far behind.

Nothing good ever comes of these abusive sessions except that they permit groups of know-nothing legislators to attempt to humiliate the leaders of some of the most important companies in America. They also consume loads of key management hours which - in these hyper-competitive times - is costly, counterproductive, and actively damaging to America's global market position.

Why anyone thinks these clown shows are productive has never been explained. Although in fairness, the price caps on insulin prices and prescription drugs that the Biden administration has executed are major and long-overdue accomplishments. They were so material and beneficial that the Orange Monster now claims that he was responsible for these new policies. He wasn't. The MAGAts had nothing whatsoever to do with it, but that's just another lie in Trump's vast portfolio of untruths.00:0001:49

The "gotcha" questions in these made-for-media harangues by idiots like MTG (R- GA), Lauren Boebert (R- CO) and James Comer (R-KY) are mostly for the benefit of right-wing cable networks. But they rarely result in anything more than displays of the ignorance of GOP hardliners. In 2018 Orin Hatch asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg how his company could sustain a business model where its users didn't pay for the service. Zuck answered, "Senator, we run ads." Congressman Louie Gohmert (R- TX) once opined that climate change legislation requiring climate-controlled environments for computers could affect the Earth's orbit.  It's often hard to tell the monkey from the organ grinder in these boring bouts of one-upmanship.

And remember when Fox host Bret Baier tried to gotcha Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg by asking him why Tesla wasn't invited to a White House session on tailpipe emissions? Imagine his surprise to learn that EVs don't have tailpipes. There's a quote attributed to Abe Lincoln that goes, "It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt." Apparently, there are plenty of politicos and pundits where Abe's warning never got through to its intended audience.

One of the most vocal and insufferable of these congressional clowns is coup conspirator "Gym" Jordan (R-Ohio) who at last count - over a six-year period - clocked more than 565 appearances on Fox and has written exactly zero pieces of legislation during that period. This idiot appears to be preparing additional hearings on nonsensical subjects and is once again planning to seek the speakership in the House if Mike Johnson, the current holder, falls by the wayside because he partnered with the Democrats to avoid the pre-election government shutdown that Trump has been demanding.

Intelligent people might simply ignore these theatrics and the millions of dollars shredded by these stupid shows, but sadly the constant noise and attacks have had two more serious and destructive effects. They have turned substantial portions of the public against the tech industry and they have encouraged and empowered long and very costly litigation by various governmental and regulatory agencies with their own agendas, who never seem to learn their lessons either.

In a digitally connected and fundamentally borderless world of increasing global competition, our own government continues to be short-sighted enough to sue, hamstring and interfere with the operations of our best and brightest businesses in a number of critical tech areas. Decades wasted in pursuit of Microsoft led nowhere, just as breaking up AT&T did absolutely nothing to help the consumer. Threats to break up Amazon and spin out AWS are a bad joke, especially since AWS presently operates more of the U.S. government's back-end computing power than the government itself. The next obvious and very precarious battlefront - with the meetings and hearings already starting - is going to be artificial intelligence, where our edge is already being seriously challenged by China and India.

Only five or six major U.S. tech companies are sufficiently resourced to do battle on our country's behalf in these massive, expensive and complex technology spaces. I've previously explained how challenging it is for smaller operators, entrepreneurs and new business builders to go up against the power and ubiquity of these major players. And that contest seems to be largely over already. Nothing that the U.S. government does in the way of trying to restrict or interfere with their growth is likely to help us in the long run.    

It doesn't take an A.I. prompt engineer to figure out that it's not really a fair fight when the government is on one side of the battle, even if the biggest and most successful tech companies in the U.S. are on the other. And, sadly for our country, it's a more obvious problem and threat when the government in question isn't even ours. The officials and regulators of the People's Republic of China are sponsoring, funding and leading the charge against the U.S. tech industry on behalf of their own China-based businesses as they try to compete with us in the critical industries of the future - especially in the area of artificial intelligence.    

Instead of the government tearing these tech leaders down with stupid hearings and pointless litigation and further slowing our country's growth and initiatives in A.I., we need our political leaders to implement programs and strategies that permit and encourage collaboratives, consortiums, and other shared efforts to put all our resources behind a concentrated effort and a single goal - a U.S. win. Or we can count on being overtaken and outrun by China in the A.I. global marketplace.  

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