Everywhere you look in tech policy land these days, people decry China as a threat to America’s technological supremacy or our national security. Many of these claims are well-founded, while others are somewhat overblown. Regardless, as I argue in a new piece for National Review this week, “America Won’t Beat China by Becoming China.” Many pundits and policymakers seem to think that only a massive dose of central planning and Big Government technocratic bureaucracy can counter the Chinese threat. It’s a recipe for a great deal of policy mischief.
Some of these advocates for a ‘let’s-be-more-like-China’ approach to tech policy also engage in revisionist histories about America’s recent success stories in the personal computing revolution and internet revolution. As I note in my essay, “[t]he revisionists instead prefer to believe that someone high up in government was carefully guiding this decentralized innovation. In the new telling of this story, deregulation had almost nothing to do with it.” In fact, I was asked by National Review to write this piece in response to a recent essay by Wells King of American Compass, who has penned some rather remarkable revisionist tales of government basically being responsible for all the innovation in digital tech sectors over the past quarter century. Markets and venture capital had nothing to do with it by his reasoning. It’s what Science writer Matt Ridley correctly labels “innovation creationism,” or the notion that it basically takes a village to raise an innovator. Continue reading →

The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.