Canada

Great read

It can be easy to believe that all this pressure is a product of the way Trump’s return to office emboldened U.S. tech companies, but it’s simply brought a longstanding process out into the open. The U.S. government has long recognized how much it benefits from ensuring other countries are dependent on products and services made by companies in its jurisdiction. For years, it used trade negotiations to insert clauses in agreements that limit foreign governments’ ability to regulate its tech companies and has used its diplomats to apply pressure in other ways.

For example, CUSMA contains measures that constrain the authority of the Canadian government to regulate the tech industry. The agreement limits the ability to regulate cross-border data flows, to force companies to reveal their source code, to discriminate between foreign and domestic tech firms, or to expect them to store data on Canadians within our borders. On top of that, U.S. officials under the Biden administration regularly pressured the government when it moved forward with tech regulations, including with the streaming bill and digital services tax. The Online News Act is the latest to find itself in U.S. crosshairs.

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As U.S. tech companies fought to roll back workers’ rights in the gig economy and beyond, allowed false information to spread across social media platforms, decimated the funding model for journalism, and had countless other negative social impacts, the Canadian government was limited in its ability to respond. All the while, as more Canadians—both individuals and companies—became dependent on U.S. digital services, the profits were siphoned back to the United States, fueling a growing economic divide that has prompted economists to start sounding the alarm.

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There is one thing we can say for Trump’s attacks on Canada: they have finally given us the space to speak openly and honestly about many of the ways the U.S.-Canada relationship has not been working for us for a very long time—and the digital dimension of our lopsided economic integration is a massive part of that. If Canada is to regain greater autonomy over its affairs and build a better society, we must get serious about reclaiming our digital sovereignty.

Since Trump’s return to office, governments have been ramping up defence spending to ensure they can defend themselves in a world where the United States is no longer a security guarantor and possibly even a security threat. That same seriousness should be given to digital technology.