CIGI Celebrates Twenty Years

Recently, the Big Tech podcast welcomed two experts offering perspectives on China’s technology industry: Hong Shen, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon and the author of Alibaba: Infrastructuring Global China, and Geoffrey Cain, an American journalist and author of The Perfect Police State.

In this opinion piece, Taylor Owen reflects on his guests’ insights and considers the challenges ahead for democratic tech governance as technologies and their impacts cross borders and boundaries. Among these challenges is Silicon Valley’s prevailing view that companies must remain unencumbered to better compete against the rising Chinese tech giants. Owen argues that a fear-induced race to the bottom could incur serious risks to democracy and that countering illiberal tech starts with good governance.

Cyber attributions — formal statements by governments for the purpose of specifically linking a malicious cyber event to a state or other actor — are recent and rarely used diplomatic tools. As Stephanie Carvin explains, although they won’t end malicious hacking any time soon, well-coordinated diplomatic statements by many states criticizing actions impose reputational costs to which many states — and China, in particular — are sensitive.

The pandemic that has killed 4.2 million people has not stopped Facebook and Google from cementing their online dominance, which may explain why they aren’t doing more to stop the misinformation thwarting public health authorities’ efforts. As Stephen Maher writes, regulators and law makers do not have the information they need to understand what is happening behind the walled gardens of the digital platforms, because the companies refuse to share it.