Top former national security officials are fighting over the geopolitical and economic security implications of a group of bipartisan antitrust bills gaining traction in Congress.
The bipartisan antitrust legislation, which passed the House Judiciary Committee last June, includes six sweeping antitrust bills aimed at reining in unfair monopolistic behavior by tech companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
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The legislation marks Washington’s most significant and serious attempt yet to reshape the technology industry.
Former national security officials Tom Ridge, secretary of homeland security under President George W. Bush, and Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security under President Barack Obama, say the bills will incentivize the tech giants, payment processors, and app developers to better prioritize security.
They argue that today’s platforms feature security flaws because of a lack of competition in the tech industry and that self-preferencing behavior undermines consumer security.
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Meanwhile, other former top intelligence community officials from multiple administrations, including former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, say the antitrust bills would hurt American tech companies with new regulations and rules while giving Chinese and foreign tech companies a pass.
“Overall, the problem with the legislation is it’s about America vs. China and freedom vs. authoritarianism,” said Robert O’Brien, former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, who opposes the antitrust legislation.
He said that of the top 20 tech companies in the world, 10 are Chinese — thus for private U.S. corporations to stay competitive with Chinese state-funded firms in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, and the space race, they can’t be weighed down by rules and regulations that only affect them and not foreign entities.
“I’m not in favor of Big Tech because of their speech and antitrust issues, but we need much more narrowly tailored solutions because these bills won’t help consumers. And instead, China will be racing ahead,” O’Brien told the Washington Examiner.
O’Brien, a partner emeritus at the law firm Larson and the head of the political consulting firm American Global Strategies, said he did not have Big Tech companies among his clients.
Those in favor of the antitrust legislation say the national security concerns around the antitrust bills are contrived and fearmongering.
The two most significant antitrust bills moving through Congress are the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would prevent tech giants like Amazon from unduly favoring their own products on their websites or creating cheaper copycats of existing products using internal data, and the Open App Markets Act, which would regulate the management of Apple’s and Google’s mobile app stores and enable greater competition on the platforms.
Supporters of the antitrust legislation say there are no national security risks from forcing Amazon not to favor its own products or stopping them from selling copycat products for cheaper.
“The national security folks against the bills are saying Amazon needs to misappropriate their merchants’ data to benefit itselves or otherwise China will eat our lunch,” said Hal Singer, an antitrust economist and professor at Georgetown University who regularly works with Democrats on tech-related legislation. “They’re saying Amazon need to do these evil things because otherwise China clobbers us, which makes it clear that they’re just carrying water for Amazon and disguising it as national security.”
Former national security officials in support of the antitrust bills say the tech companies are using China as a boogeyman to protect monopolistic practices.
“The security claims are simply a pretext to maintain complete control over a growing market and hold back the benefits and value a truly open app economy could provide Americans,” Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania and former secretary of homeland security, told the Washington Examiner.
“I would counter that the Open App Markets Act is exactly the targeted, narrow legislative solution that will benefit the technology economy and American consumers — without posing any threats even close to the hyperbolic dangers touted by its opposition,” he said.
The Big Tech platforms themselves say that their recent efforts to restrict aggressively Russian government accounts, state media, and those trying to spread Russian disinformation related to the invasion of Ukraine is an example of how important it is for U.S. tech companies to remain dominant internationally without any antitrust legislation to hold them back.
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“Foreign platforms from authoritarian governments have way less incentive to do the right thing in any situation, especially a crisis, and they’ll become more dominant if the antitrust bills pass,” said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, an advocacy group backed by Big Tech companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Google.
