Trump’s Bumbling, Racist Anti-China Protectionism Extends To Data Centers

from the corrupt-and-incompetent,-at-scale dept

The Trump administration’s anti-Chinese protectionism is routinely a disastrous, xenophobic mess that mostly just injects chaos, cronyism, and higher prices into U.S. tech markets under the pretense of protecting privacy and national security. All propped up by bumbling Democrats and a corporate press incapable of highlighting that the emperor is buck-ass naked.

Four years of histrionics about China’s connection to TikTok, for example, simply resulted in the administration with Democrat help) hijacking the platform and giving it to his billionaire buddies, who’ll then do all the same things lawmakers worried about China doing (propaganda, privacy abuses).

There was also a massive, decade-long hysterical freak-out about Huawei gear in U.S. telecom networks, which resulted in the government engaging in a massive “rip and replace” campaign that Congress simply forgot to finish funding or following up on, resulting in higher prices for consumers and telecoms alike.

More recently there was the Trump FCC’s efforts to try and ban Chinese drones based on completely baseless security fear mongering, which overseas companies have found it trivial to bypass because the administration has mostly lobotomized our regulators. The result has been higher consumer prices, lots of market chaos, furious hobbyists, and shittier product availability.

The Trump administration is utterly incompetent, historically corrupt, and completely incapable of adopting protectionism at this scale even if it was a good idea (it’s not). Yet that’s not really been well reflected in most journalism covering the steady extension of this bumbling protectionism into Chinese routers, robots, vacuums, lawnmowers, and cheap inverters (necessary to manage climate change mitigation).

Now the Trump administration is pretending it’s going to eliminate the entirety of Chinese hardware — including transceivers — from domestic U.S. data centers. Again there’s zero real indication the Trump administration is capable of any of this, but that’s not really reflected in coverage by Reuters. Though they do bother to mention this will likely result in higher prices for everybody:

“A ban could also raise costs ‌for American cloud ⁠firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as U.S.-based Coherent and Lumentum.”

This bumbling protectionism highlights the bizarre incoherence of the Trump administration. The underlying corruption has the administration fixated on gutting, defunding, and destaffing regulators now managed by a rotating crop of unqualified sycophants. But they then like to pretend they can then place these elaborate policy proposals on the back of whatever’s left, and expect it all to just work.

They despise and hate competent governance and regulatory autonomy, do everything in their power to dismantle it, then pretend the resulting pile of garbage remains load-bearing for real policy.

At the same time, the administration professes to be shoring up U.S. cybersecurity defenses while simultaneously dismantling domestic cybersecurity preparedness. It’s an incoherent mess, and more often than not Trump cybersecurity policy is indistinguishable from a foreign attack.

What Trumpism mostly wants is a tribute system wherein they erect new barriers to market entry, then receive assorted tribute by companies that want to still operate in the country. They also want to redirect more business to the administration’s friends, donors, and family (like the Trump sons’ drone companies). Time and time again, national security and privacy are mostly just used for scare-mongering purposes.

Worse, Democrats often help them and frequently aren’t much better. See for example this effort by Dem lawmakers in Michigan to ban Chinese EVs from even visiting the state under the pretense of protecting U.S. consumer privacy. Or their massive policy own-goal on supporting a ban of TikTok during an election season where authoritarianism was on the line, and the youth vote mattered more than ever.

Ideally, I’d maintain that the best approach is to let Chinese gear (EVs, robots, AI, vacuums, drones) compete in the U.S. market, but shore up your labor, privacy, environmental, and consumer protection regulators to ensure a truly level playing field. Domestic U.S. corporate giants don’t like that because it means more competition and oversight, so instead we get this clumsy, corrupt absurdism.

Even if anti-Chinese protectionism was a good idea (it’s not), this administration is too corrupt, erratic, and incompetent to accomplish it. Yet when you’re reading tech press coverage of Trump’s latest protectionist push, I’d like you to notice how that’s uniformly either downplayed or ignored entirely.

Filed Under: ai, china, chinese, data centers, drones, hardware, protectionism