3.3 The American Pivot
Until recently, the United States largely pursued a ‘free’ global digital trade regime which upheld the dominance ofits platforms globally. However, Donald Trump’s message that free trade represented a cost to the US economy has since come to form a cross-party consensus on the need for mercantilist practices, especially in the digital sphere. The Biden administration committed to protecting strategic sectors within a proverbial ‘small yard’ by a ‘high fence’ that includes export controls, investment screening, and tariffs (Sullivan, 2022). Such initiatives signal a broad shift in US policy, in which the global and systemic significance of US digital platforms is recognized – and safeguarding their overwhelming power is an explicit objective requiring direct and explicit forms of intervention anathema to a free trade agenda. In addition to discouraging other governments from regulating US platform firms, this is done by limiting Chinese platform firms’ access to capital, technology, and markets.
The Clean Network Initiative (Table 2) was introduced by the Trump administration, and it represented the first major rupture in the field of digital policy. Whereas previous policy underpinned globalization and prioritized free trade, the Clean Network Initiative discouraged governments and firms from working with ‘high-risk’ Chinese firms such as Huawei and ZTE that are purportedly ‘required to comply with directives of the Chinese Communist Party’ (U.S. State Department, 2021). Six fields of regulation were identified, whose collective ambition was to ‘clean’ the technology stacks of third countries of Chinese operators.
The results of the Clean Network Initiative were mixed. While it attracted broad formal support, fewer countries were prepared to make the hard trade-offs involved in ending relations with Chinese firms. A number of countries did cease doing business with Huawei: Canada commissioned Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung to build its 5 G networks, while the UK banned the installation ofnew Huawei equipment in 2020 and plans to remove it entirely by 2027 (Payne and
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Reinventing Capitalism