From National Journal
The Balkanization of Global Tech
By Brendan Bordelon
During Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate this month, one largely overlooked exchange between him and Sen. Dan Sullivan revealed how the world’s dominant social-media platform views its place in the world.
“Only in America, would you agree with that?” asked Sullivan, as he praised the 33-year-old’s creation of a multi-billion-dollar tech platform in less than a decade. “You couldn’t do this in China, right?”
It was the ultimate softball question, but the Facebook founder wouldn’t take the swing. “Well, senator, there are—there are some very strong Chinese companies,” Zuckerberg demurred, much to Sullivan’s surprise....
“The tech world imagined itself as being American firms playing on a global stage,” said Steven Weber, a professor at the University of California (Berkeley)’s School of Information....
Weber cautioned that the United States could suffer by shutting its tech firms out of participation in the Chinese market, noting that researchers into artificial intelligence and data analytics have much to learn from China’s massive population. “If data is the juice that drives machine-learning systems … then the Chinese have access to a much larger pool of data than we do,” he said....
