The Snowden
Revelations over the last year have had a not-insignificant impact
on American-based technology companies’ overseas existing and prospective
business. U.S. multinationals, including
IBM, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Qualcomm are all under fire in China, and
many are experiencing declining sales in other markets, whether in Europe,
Latin America or elsewhere.
While the
threat of compromised equipment and software is quite real, whether the doing
of State or non-State actors, from a pure technology perspective, such threats
cannot be managed by blackballing companies by virtue of their location of
headquarters. Such techno-nationalist
approaches fly in the face of the commercial and technological realities of the
information and communications technology (ICT) industry, as today's ICT companies are transnational by
nature, with research and development, coding and manufacturing spread out across
the globe.
The U.S.
pioneered the model of modern day techno-nationalism in the context of multiple
and opaque market access barriers to China-based telecommunications equipment multinationals,
starting in earnest in 2010, and always based on nebulous, never-substantiated
and always-prospective national security concerns. Like their American-headquartered peers,
these China-based companies operate worldwide and rely on global supply chains,
integrating gear and software from countries across the globe.
Born of
Sino-phobia, the American techno-nationalist precedent is now being readily
adopted in markets around the world, including China, and being deployed
against American firms perceived to be uniquely vulnerable to U.S. Government
penetration and compromise.
Techno-nationalism
heralds a potential age of 21st century politico-mercantilism that is in
absolutely no-one’s best interest and, moreover, does little to nothing to
address the very real concerns associated with network and data integrity, or
for that matter, privacy. Rather, the
fragmentation of the global ICT industry and related supply chains, as well as
the Balkanization of the Cloud, will lead to dramatic and very real adverse implications
for the intrinsically global Internet-based society in which we work and live.
In today’s
age, no network is secure, nor will any network ever be entirely secure. But the integrity of networks and data can be
bolstered, and confidence in ICT gear and telecommunications and Internet
services can be, to some extent, restored.
Techno-nationalism is intrinsically contrary to such goals.
We have
reached a critical moment in time in which industry and government must agree
to a “pause,” and, further, a conversation about real solutions, rather than
trade-distorting and market-disrupting politically-inspired ineffective
policies based on irrelevant physical geographical boundaries.
Governments
must accelerate the process of agreeing among themselves what is acceptable
behavior in terms of cyber activity.
This does not have to be overly-granular to begin with. Start, for instance, with “We won’t crash
your stock market if you won’t crash our electricity grid,” and then work from
there.
Governments
must also allow and encourage industry to define commercially rational, technologically
feasible, and certifiable industry-wide standards, disciplines and best
practices for the development and delivery of commercial ICT product and
code. In such an environment, “security
assurance” will emerge as a market-based selling point for ICT vendors,
alongside technology, quality and price.
These are
starting points, they are not the end result.
But they are far, far preferable to the rising crescendo of
techno-nationalist policies that are threatening to unravel the ICT industry,
an industry that is critical to continued global economic development, growth,
productivity and prosperity.