State vs Tech

We live in strange times. The world's largest undefended border - that between the USA and Canada - is becoming hostile; the North Atlantic, until recently the Mare Nostrum of the Western World, looks like a gulf of separation; thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Moscow might win The Cold War. In such times, a question has to be asked - who decides the international order?

Cynically, it’s whoever wields the biggest stick. All of history's great empires - Roman, Persian, Frankish, Ottoman, etc. - didn't just decide their own affairs, they endeavoured to decide them for everyone within marching distance as well. Countless petty kings lost their heads thinking they were distant enough to disobey an empire, or that their forests were too dense to be invaded. Naturally, the first power to rise to global rule took this policy to its logical conclusion - The British Empire's military could be felt everywhere.

And being the world's menacing bully was effective. The few thousand people who actually held power in London were able to unilaterally redraw other peoples' borders, pressure economic rivals to abolish slavery, enforce preferential trading agreements, and tilt the global pool of resources and transactions in their favour. This made them fabulously wealthy (their descendants still are) but unsurprisingly a bit unpopular. When war split Britain's world into an East led by Moscow and a West led by Washington, the Americans came up with a more sophisticated approach - allowing access to America's internal market.

Instead of Britain's unveiled threat "do as we say or we'll bomb you," there came the more nuanced "do as we advise and we'll let your companies sell to our people." That might seem a little weak but in 1960, the US economy accounted for 40% of global GDP. With much of the rest of the globe under communist control, there was little any country in the West could do but serve as an economic auxiliary to the US. Disobey and Washington could turn off the financial tap.

That tap had an interesting effect on the coercion of multinational corporations. Britain couldn't really threaten to bomb a company out of existence but America can say to companies "behave like this or we'll make things difficult for you in the American market." This is so effective that Washington can influence how Egyptian companies behave in Turkey, and how Australian companies behave in Japan. Money doesn't just talk, it gives orders.

Naturally, the USA couldn't keep the planet to itself forever. While America is still the world's most powerful single country, it has not enjoyed an unbroken spell as its largest economy. Europe caught up through the great boom at the turn of the millennium, and having consolidated much of itself through the European Union, has sought to leverage access to its internal market against multinationals. And for a couple of decades now, companies that want to trade in Europe, including the biggest American tech companies, have had to listen to Brussels, even about things as badly implemented as "the cookie law". This is all normal.

What's odd, is that Britain - currently alone off the coast of France - thinks it can pull the same trick with an internal market valued at about 2.5% of global GDP. This is silly. It began under the previous Tory government's Investigatory Powers Act (or Snooper's Charter) that, among other things, seeks to compel tech companies to allow British authorities to access user data. Two things are nonsensical about it.

The first is that it makes zero-access encryption - through which tech companies themselves can't see your data - essentially impossible. The second is that the act was used to order Apple to break the encryption on iCloud backups worldwide, effectively forcing it to use weaker protections with exploitable backdoors. Other than potentially losing access to Britain's modest internal market, there was no reason for Apple to comply with this, so it didn't.

I rarely side with tech companies over democratic states - least of all my own - but Apple was right to disobey, both practically and ethically. Every time you've heard about a mass hack, including those that infamously hit iCloud some years ago, it’s because weaker forms of encryption have failed. Zero-access encryption is much stronger, even theoretically unbreakable with extant technologies, making it the only known way to keep your data truly safe. This is so self-evident to the tech community that condemnation of the British position is near universal.

What's more, several other tech companies have publicly stated that they won't comply either. The general consensus is that they would rather withdraw from the British market than be forced to weaken encryption for their users. This is the only rational position they can hold and I'd wager that many more companies maintain this view privately. It will be interesting to see how things play out.

I suspect (hope!) that the new - and currently lauded - Labour government under Keir Starmer will seek a quiet way of backtracking on its predecessor’s mistake. If it doesn't, Britain's much-stated aim of becoming a tech superpower simply won’t fly.

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