What an all around terrible situation. The US government has had over two decades to come up with general laws to protect personal information and maintain competition by requiring open interoperability - protecting against
all attackers foreign and domestic. Instead, they've sat on their hands while the surveillance industry has been allowed to keep festering, becoming ever more entrenched in Americans' day to day lives while being championed as bastions of "growth" and "innovation".
Now that a single foreign company has gained the level of breakout popularity that had already been achieved by 20+ domestic companies, it's time for pearl clutching galore. Every single argument being levied at China and their authoritarianism is a dynamic we've already been suffering from domestic corporations and their authoritarianism. Give me a break!
Instead of hanging their hats on this simplistic election year stunt, the government could still create universal regulations that reign in the surveillance industry and give Americans control of their personal data and digital lives, preserving individual liberty rather than trying to mitigate the downstream effects on the collective. Yet apart from essentially toothless regulations by a few states regarding some very specific types of personal data, still crickets.
So I guess the lawmakers' concerns still aren't really about protecting Americans, but just making sure nominally American surveillance companies at least get paid when Americans get surveilled and propagandized by foreign powers? It seems like no matter which way this case gets decided and which way the precedent gets set, We the People are set to lose.
Now that a single foreign company has gained the level of breakout popularity that had already been achieved by 20+ domestic companies, it's time for pearl clutching galore. Every single argument being levied at China and their authoritarianism is a dynamic we've already been suffering from domestic corporations and their authoritarianism. Give me a break!
Instead of hanging their hats on this simplistic election year stunt, the government could still create universal regulations that reign in the surveillance industry and give Americans control of their personal data and digital lives, preserving individual liberty rather than trying to mitigate the downstream effects on the collective. Yet apart from essentially toothless regulations by a few states regarding some very specific types of personal data, still crickets.
So I guess the lawmakers' concerns still aren't really about protecting Americans, but just making sure nominally American surveillance companies at least get paid when Americans get surveilled and propagandized by foreign powers? It seems like no matter which way this case gets decided and which way the precedent gets set, We the People are set to lose.