There is an even greater threat to U.S. tech companies that has gotten far less attention. In sharp contrast to today’s United States, the European Union has a strong commitment to the rule of law, obliging politicians to comply with judge’s rulings. The Trump administration’s scofflaw tendencies and tech companies’ increasing hostility toward European values may lead to the collapse of the EU-U.S. arrangements on which tech companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft depend.
Schmidt worried a decade ago that an EU-U.S. data dispute might collapse the Internet. Snowden showed how U.S. intelligence agencies had illicitly accessed European social media and Internet search data, breaching European privacy rules. That dispute was patched over by an ungainly agreement, negotiated between the European Commission and the U.S. government. The EU agreed to allow data flows, as long as the United States committed to protecting the privacy rights of EU citizens and offered some means of redress if they were violated by U.S. surveillance agencies. The keystone of the arrangement was a 2016 U.S. commitment that Washington’s surveillance agencies would respect European privacy rights through a process overseen by an obscure U.S. body, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
This arrangement made nobody happy but provided legal and political cover for flows of data across the Atlantic. Meta continued to operate Facebook in Europe, and companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were able to host Europeans’ personal data on their cloud-computing platforms. For those companies, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Google alone makes over $100 billion in sales in Europe.
One major reason for that is that the majority of deportation numbers are actually happening at the border, with illegal crossings and attempts. For obvious reasons, much less people are trying to get into the country under Trump, hence deportations are down.
We can hope. I would not have wanted to wager the future of the US on the incompetence of a small group of people, however.
That’s usually true. But when one side is threatening to smash the system for good, that’s not the time to be game-theorying it.
Game theory is too simplistic to cover all of the factors that go into a political decision a voter makes. Some people are just angry because we ignored them for too long and you’re never going to regain credibility unless you reinvent yourself entirely and honestly. Some were taught that they need to be selfish to survive by market forces - if you didn’t go to uni it’s your fault your life prospects are so bad. Our politicians don’t want to change anything usually because they’re beneficiaries of the system that was set up with intent of enriching very specific people they’re dependent on.
We’re kind of screwed and the only thing that comes to my mind that can prevent further escalation is polarising across a different axis that can be a proxy for wealth inequality. That’s because this obviously favours normal people against ultra rich. Currently both liberals and conservatives work for the rich only and what happens to us is mostly a byproduct of free market whims. This can’t go on further, otherwise we’ll have to fight increasing numbers of Georgescus, Le Pens, Farages and the likes, until the dam finally gives and a wave of fascism storms. We can keep pacifying it through the judiciary but then a violent revolution becomes more likely.