If you enjoy badly written bipartisan protectionist tech legislation designed primarily to coddle giant U.S. companies under the xenophobia-tinged breathless pretense of privacy and national security, you are really going to enjoy the next twelve to twenty-four months.
While the U.S. drowns in corrupt kakistocracy, the Chinese are making significant market inroads in everything from AI to EVs. That’s resulted in U.S. companies applying greater and greater pressure on U.S. lawmakers to simply ban Chinese goods. The Trump administration’s adoption of this policy has been a hot and sloppy protectionist mess, incompetently implemented and unsubtly racist.
Automakers are particularly worried about cheaper, better Chinese EVs making their way to the U.S. So under the banner of the misleadingly named Alliance for Automotive Innovation, they’re pressuring U.S. lawmakers to enact a ban on Chinese EVs. You know, because they’re very worried about privacy and national security:
“Right now, Chinese automakers are dumping subsidized vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world,” John Bozzella, CEO of the group, said in the letter seen by CNBC. “This hasn’t happened inside the U.S. yet, but given the scale and urgency of this threat, we urge you to enact a Chinese vehicle, software and hardware ban before adjourning this year and make this policy the law of the land.”
“Enacting a permanent ban on Chinese vehicles and high-risk hardware and software in the 119th Congress will send a clear and bipartisan message that China’s strategy to dominate global automotive manufacturing will be met with a national security policy response from the American government,” Bozzella said.
So for one, I like how the auto industry throws the word “subsidized” around as if they haven’t enjoyed generations’ worth of their own pointless subsidies. Two, the U.S. auto industry has some of the worst privacy standards and ratings of any industry in America, and sell the entirety of your driving, personal, and behavior data to any old random asshole in a country too corrupt to pass privacy laws.
Failing to secure your own vehicles and fighting tooth and nail against any privacy safeguards… then ranting incoherently about the threat of Chinese tech on U.S. shores is not serious policy. Our failure to regulate data brokers or pass modern privacy laws means the Chinese simply buy this same data from any of dozens of dodgy companies already, making a lot of this stuff lazy pantomime.
We’ve seen this before: Democratic lawmakers in Michigan recently tried to ban Chinese EVs from even visiting the state, suggesting that automakers are afraid of Americans even getting to look at overseas alternatives. The justification (by folks who are are, again, completely absent when it comes to any sort of domestic U.S. privacy standards) is they were just very concerned about U.S. consumer privacy.
I maintain that ideally you allow Chinese companies to compete in the U.S. market, but you fund, staff, and legally protect your labor, consumer, competition, and environmental regulators so that companies are all genuinely competing on a level playing field. You boot or penalize obvious bad actors on privacy, security, competition, and consumer protection, both foreign and domestic.
U.S. corporate giants don’t much want that, given it means more oversight, more competition, and diminished quarterly returns. So what we often get instead is a sort of a corrupt-fueled incompetent rank protectionism that’s highly performative but still broadly harmful.
And while you could theoretically implement protectionism in a way that’s coherent, the U.S. is too corrupt to do that. So what you get is stuff like the TikTok ban, which was driven by years of hysteria about Chinese spying and propaganda, only to result in a bipartisan array of lawmakers shoveling TikTok off to Trump’s billionaire autocrat friends, which was not any net improvement.
Or you get stuff like the “race to 5G,” which involved U.S. policymakers being told that the only way to keep pace with Chinese 5G was to give U.S. telecoms less oversight, more pointless subsidies, and approval for their terrible mergers (the U.S. lost the “race to 5G” in terms of reach, network quality, and affordability then immediately just… stopped talking about it).
Or you get stuff like the recent ban on Chinese drones, which the Trump FCC is too incompetent to implement, resulting in higher prices, lower quality products on U.S. shelves, new corrupt patronage systems, and a lot of pointless chaos.
As a backdrop we have a U.S. corporate press that’s incapable of expressing how badly any of this is going in practice (often because affluent media ownership supports the administration and its mindless deregulation), resulting in this strange disconnect between material reality and the performance lawmakers put on to convince themselves they’re doing serious and useful policy.
If U.S. policymakers cared about privacy and national security they’d pass a meaningful modern privacy law (with powerful penalties for U.S. companies or executives), and they’d regulate data brokers. If they cared about national security, they’d eject Donald Trump from the body politic. Unless they’re doing these things, they’re not really worth taking seriously on privacy or national security.
With cheaper Chinese AI models threatening U.S. tech giants’ dreams of software automation walled garden dominance, you can expect all of this sort of performative dysfunction to get much much dumber, supported by the press and the kind of folks who’ll talk your ear off over cocktails about how much they love free markets and the kind of innovation forged in the furnace of real competition.