The debate in many Western democracies on what to do about TikTok hinged around a few, very real concerns. The first concern related to the danger of a foreign adversary being able to use very powerful algorithms to shape the discourse around any issue and amplify misinformation. The second concern was in having a foreign adversary gaining deep access to data profiles of so many citizens, as the algorithm is able to generate incredibly rich profiles of its users.

The root problem is one of trust. The debate circled around our growing awareness on how much power and influence modern technologies have over our work, our knowledge, our opinions and, by extension, our democracy and its institutions.

The concern was also not theoretical. We know what China could do with the platform because it is what we are already doing with western tech platforms - US Intelligence and the 5 Eyes currently have the capabilities we are talking about, but because we “trust” each other, those are compromises we live with. The worry is; what happens when an adversary controls key parts of your information infrastructure?

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I think we will look back at the current moment as the time that American technology dominance began its decline.

The moment that the US made its allies question their trustworthiness, the entire question of collaboration on technology platforms changed. American tech companies have benefited handsomely from global markets, with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple providing technology used by individuals, governments and businesses around the world. Just as many NATO members grew lazy in investing in their militaries because American protection was already so much easier to rely on, not many countries bothered to create homegrown tech like cloud storage, AI processing, email or productivity software. After all, why would you? American tech is so great, and, how on earth could you compete with Microsoft and Google on core productivity tools?

As a Canadian, I was forced to ask myself, if the US decided to follow through on its threat to annex my country, what might the first step be in that process? Our entire government runs on Azure and Google Cloud - if the US decided to hit the kill switch, our country couldn’t even run payroll, let alone send out any communications.

This should be a wake up call for anyone outside of the US that uses American technology. I’m writing this on a Mac (US), publishing it to Substack (US), my company runs on Google Workplace (US), my AI tools are Anthropic (US), OpenAI (US) and Gemini (US) and my backup cloud storage is Dropbox (US) and Box (US).

Europe is already waking up to their dependence on American technology, with Poland questioning whether Starlink can be trusted as a connectivity partner in Ukraine, sending Eutelsat shares soaring. The threat of Musk deciding to switch off access at key moments was enough to start some serious soul searching, but I think set off some deeper questioning on what it means for unpredictable, untrustworthy parties owning your data access.

With all of the recent patriotic fervour in Canada, I hope that begins to translate into the tech scene, as this country needs to take a long, hard look at what it means to be entirely dependent on a country that is declaring itself as an adversary for all of our information technology. We need a coordinated response, both from our tech industry - where there is a ton of talent - along with industry and government. We need our own DARPA.

For those making decisions for their organizations on tech, it is worth running some scenarios on what the impacts would be of losing connectivity to all of your cloud services, as a very minimum consideration. Build a contingency plan in the short term, but in the long term, we need to build new infrastructure.

The tech market is never going to be the same.

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