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.