The other side of it is the lost trust in American tech. That’s most prominent in the military debates around whether other countries can rely on their expensive hardware working if they run afoul of American policy, or if the president is looking for leverage to extort a mineral deal, but it’s also highly relevant for the civilian side. For pretty much as long as we’ve had computers, most other countries have trusted hardware made by American companies running operating systems and applications made by American companies. Now everyone has to wonder what kind of espionage or sabotage would be possible if those companies were pressured – or whether the guys standing on stage would even need to be pressured. Suddenly, giving Google the ability to push code onto most of the devices in the world looks less like a security win and more like a risk - and it’s famously hard to establish trust without the rule of law as the foundation. Snowden started it but most allied governments were confident that there were limits in a way which is a lot harder to believe now.
I am expecting that 2024 will be seen as the peak for American tech companies: the longer this goes on, the more competition they’ll have with advantages they can’t match in foreign markets – especially if many of the immigrants who worked at those companies decide to start companies after leaving.
I am expecting that 2024 will be seen as the peak for American tech companies: the longer this goes on, the more competition they’ll have with advantages they can’t match in foreign markets – especially if many of the immigrants who worked at those companies decide to start companies after leaving.