US power to rule a digital world ebbs away

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/09/trade-war-trump-technology-internet-protectionism-web-business-morozov-uber
America’s global village is disintegrating. Just look at digital platforms, which, with their ability to scale everywhere, were supposed to be the apex of US techno-hegemony. The plan worked, but only initially. Then, Silicon Valley discovered that America’s closest allies were successfully funding local challengers to the global expansion of US technology giants.
Consider Uber: its global ambitions have been checked by Ola in India, DiDi in China, 99 in Brazil, Grab in south-east Asia, and Yandex. Taxi in Russia.
And with the exception of Yandex, all of these challengers – including Uber itself – were funded by Japan’s SoftBank and folded into its Vision Fund. The latter pools the money of America’s closest allies, from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates. When Uber found itself burning cash at astronomical rates, it did a deal with Softbank.
China’s ascent challenged many other myths behind American techno-hegemony. Thus, once-neutral tech standards – such as 5G – were suddenly subject to fierce contestation, with Beijing demanding rules favourable to its own champions. Moreover, the global ambitions of Huawei and ZTE and the tremendous growth of other Chinese players such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, have also forced Washington to do the unthinkable: exercise hard power, rendering its hegemony visible.
So we saw moves such as Trump’s veto of the Qualcomm-Broadcom merger, the nearly lethal disruption to ZTE, and the controversial White House memo about nationalising America’s 5G network: one could, of course, suppose that this is all just an affirmation of Washington’s superiority.