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Opinion | Southeast Asia must factor Big Tech firms into its US-China calculus

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Opinion | Southeast Asia must factor Big Tech firms into its US-China calculus

For Asean’s own member states, this annual meeting of top diplomats provides external validation of the grouping and recalls the region’s historical role as an entrepot for commodities as well as ideas and dialogue. In Southeast Asia, power and persuasion have been traded as long as goods and services have been.
However, the preference among Asean and its member states for separating complex international politics from economic engagement leaves Southeast Asia with three blind spots: the expanding interpretation of national security considerations overlapping with business concerns, the role of large technology firms in this conflation and the risk of inadvertent geopolitical alignment through tech dependency.
One of the more significant examples of national security creep as a function of US-China competition is in the building out of the digital tech infrastructure in and around Southeast Asia. As part of the Trump administration’s Clean Network initiative, countries in the region planning their 5G roll-out a few years ago received both inducements and warnings by the US about choosing Huawei as their core network provider.
Similarly, where US, Chinese and other companies once formed consortiums to fund the capital outlay for undersea communication cables crossing the region, such collaboration is becoming increasingly rare as Washington seeks to not only reduce its exposure to Beijing but gain the upper hand in some instances. A Reuters investigation from last March found US government intervention in at least six undersea cable agreements in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Hong Kong leg of a transpacific high-speed internet cable has been cancelled over concerns about Hong Kong’s autonomy from the mainland. Source: Data Center Dynamics
Additionally, companies such as Google and Meta are entering into national security agreements with the US government as they lay their own transpacific undersea cables in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam. These companies have spent heavily in Southeast Asia over the years – Microsoft recently announced around US$4 billion worth of artificial intelligence and cloud investment between Indonesia and Malaysia, while Google has committed US$2 billion in Malaysia – and are likely to continue serving as an anchor of the region’s digital strategies.
However, with market capitalisation and annual revenue streams that exceed the gross domestic product of some countries’ economies, longer-term questions of outsize influence on policymaking, infrastructure dependence and the impact of the Washington-Silicon Valley nexus on Southeast Asia should be asked if regional agency is going to be meaningfully exercised.
The link between politics and technology comes into sharper focus when considering the positions of US industry leaders such as Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Schmidt is now the chairman of the Special Competitive Studies Project, whose mission is to ensure the US is “positioned and organised to win the techno-economic competition between now and 2030, the critical window for shaping the future”, has argued that “Washington must develop incentives that can appeal to ‘swing states’ that are currently calculating whether China or the United States offers a more attractive approach to technology”.
Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former Google CEO, speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington on February 23, 2021, during a hearing on emerging technologies and their impact on national security. Photo: AP
The world’s major powers often see Southeast Asian states as objects to be won over and swayed into their camp. But as tech giants extend their reach into the national security and military domains across the world and as geopolitical tensions intensify and spill over to non-aligned countries, the region can expect to face more difficult choices.
As Southeast Asia prepares for a leadership change in the US, the Silicon Valley heavyweights backing the Republican and Democratic nominees might provide some insight into the direction of any strategic shifts. SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has fully endorsed former US president Donald Trump, as have influential venture capitalists such as Joe Lonsdale. Meanwhile, Vice-President Kamala Harris has pulled in the support of big-ticket tech personalities such as former Meta CEO Sheryl Sandberg, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Netflix executive chairman Reed Hastings.

To be sure, the battle for tech support in the upcoming US presidential election will largely be carried out through domestic issues or political ideology rather than grander strategic machinations. But as with political campaigns in any other country, big money has a tendency to move big policy.

These days, it is not only states but also large corporations – particularly in the tech industry – which shift the power calculus on the international stage. For Southeast Asia and Asean, recognising this fact should provide grounds to take a more comprehensive, cross-sectoral and long-term approach to engaging with their external partners. Otherwise, the region will be viewing the world as it wants to, not as it really is.

Elina Noor is a senior fellow in the Asia Programme at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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