Silicon Valley has dominated recent news, from disgraced Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick’s leave of absence to work on “Self 2.0”, to the threat of massive antitrust fines against Google in Europe, to Amazon devouring the upmarket grocer Whole Foods.It will this week too, as the leaders of Big Tech gather at the White House for a summit on how private sector technology companies can help government tackle its largest digital dilemmas.
The CEOs will give President Donald Trump ideas for how to use Big Data, adopt cloud computing and make procurement more efficient. But our biggest technology conundrum — what to do about the fact that Silicon Valley holds too much economic and political power — isn’t on the agenda.
No wonder. Over the past few years, Big Tech has quietly become the dominant political lobbying power in Washington, spending huge amounts of cash and exerting serious soft power in an effort to avoid regulatory disruption of its business model, which is now the most profitable one in the private sector.