Apple has made very questionable compromises with China’s Communist government to operate its data centers containing Chinese customer information there. The government essentially controls Apple’s data centers, according to this excellent article in today’s New York Times.
Apple says its systems in China are “sequestered” from the rest of its global iCloud platform. Yet at the same time, Apple says personnel in the United States monitor what is happening at the Chinese data centers. So some form of electronic connection exists and that may give the Chinese access to Apple’s global footprint.
Apple’s primary interest in China was and remains making money. Tim Cook rode the China operations into becoming CEO of Apple and accumulating vast personal wealth. It’s much the same story at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Qualcomm and Nvidia. Facebook is not in China, but receives $5 billion a year in advertising from Chinese entities.
My new book is entitled, “A Grand Strategy: Countering China, Taming Technology, and Restoring the Media.”
In it, I argue that the U.S. government must come to terms with America’s tech giants to accomplish three things vis a vis China:
–Big Tech cannot continue fueling the rise of China’s military power and its surveillance state. It must agree to some form of limits on the technology it sells in China.
–Big Tech must cooperate with the U.S. government to stop the widespread cyberhacking that China is conducting in the United States. The fact that the technology companies have not adequately protected themselves and seem to believe that national security is the government’s problem, not theirs, has crippled the American response.
–Lastly, as the Biden Administration gears up its technology development and commercialization efforts, America’s large companies must take part in helping the government in developing AI, quantum computing, genetic editing and all the other advanced technologies that are visible on the horizon. And those technologies, where applicable, must be sold to the U.S. military.
In short, the gap between the U.S. government and the large tech companies must be narrowed. I recognize that the United States is a pluralistic nation where different sets of interests are pursued by different players. But when it comes to China, we must become more cohesive as a nation–or be blown away.
