Larry Summers’ “I Could’ve Had a V-8 Moment” on U.S. Regulators’ Persecution of U.S. Tech Companies

April 19, 2024

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who presciently warned the Biden Administration that blowout bills like the Inflation Reduction Act would actually generate inflation, is now slapping his head about the strange, perverse war that same administration is waging on America’s most innovative tech companies.

Summers said:

“Silly me, I think in a world of global competition and where we’re competing with China … when I think of our large technology companies, I think of national champions assuring American leadership, not rapacious monopolists that need to be cut down to scale so they won’t have a chance of competing against China.”

Summers is referring to the multiple antitrust actions the administration is waging against Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Google, to name just a few. At some point, the relentless push to break the business models of these national champions will start to have an impact. Witness the stasis in IBM’s innovation when it had to fight an antitrust action that spanned from the late 1960s to 1982.

We would add to Summers’ astute observation another head-slap worthy action – the bizarre move by U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to disavow long-standing American support for an open internet. Instead, she has eagerly agreed to data localization and the sharing of the source codes of U.S. companies with illiberal regimes.

Data localization acquiesces to the desire of dictatorships to wall off their internet access, denying democracy activists and journalists the ability to be heard by the rest of the world. A provision to force the sharing of source code would empower these regimes, while giving China and cybercriminals potential access to the guts of major U.S. tech companies’ business operations.

If that happened, malevolent state and criminal actors would have the keys to the kingdom of sensitive digital information of the U.S. military, large and small U.S. companies, banks and other financial institutions, as well as the personal information of Americans that our companies hold and protect. Expect these invaders to act with the same decorum that Alaric the Visigoth treated the citizens of Rome. Why would we open these gates to people who hate us?

U.S. regulators are so blinkered by ideology that it seems they actually want Alaric inside our walls. We’ve been too successful. We owe it to Alaric. We’ve got it coming.