What could be one of the more awkward sit-downs in recent US political history takes place in New York Wednesday afternoon: President-elect Donald Trump has invited the chief executives of some of America’s foremost tech companies to talk shop.
While none of these tech executives signed any #NeverTrump pledges, they also made no move to endorse him during the campaign and some expressed distinct unease over Trump’s views. That could lead to some edgy moments — so could the real policy differences between Trump and these tech leaders.
What they should say to Trump.
The cast of characters includes Alphabet, Inc., (GOOG, GOOGL) CEO Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt, Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, Cisco (CSCO) CEO Chuck Robbins, Facebook (FB) COO Sheryl Sandberg, IBM (IBM) CEO Ginni Rometty, Intel (INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, Oracle (ORCL) CEO Safra Catz and Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
With no detailed agenda set beyond a broad focus on jobs—and with few concrete tech-policy goals announced by Trump—the summit attendees might as well start by telling Trump to his face why they still oppose some of the tech-related stances he took during the campaign.
No, Mr. President-Elect, they should say: You can’t order parts of the internet closed up when it was designed to route around such interruptions. No, you can’t demand that tech companies ship secure encryption that also supports back-door access to law-enforcement authorities.
These C-suite types could soften the last blow by noting that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton waffled quite a bit about encryption, giving Trump a chance to look decisive on the issue now.
They should offer their assistance with cybersecurity in general. The recent history of hacks into both government and political organizations—some of which the CIA now thinks were done by the Russian government to hurt Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton— shows the public sector needs the help.
At the same time, the tech execs ought to take the opportunity to say they will not help the government build any registries of religious or ethnic minorities—a task that some of their employees have already pledged to resist.
But I fear they won’t: When The Intercept asked Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Twitter (TWTR), and government contractors Booz Allen Hamilton, CGI and SRA International if they would refuse to develop a registry of Muslims, only Twitter said no. (The others didn’t respond or declined to comment on the issue.) And Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has yet to be reported to be on the guest list for this get-together.
Dorsey would also be the best person to tell Trump directly that sharing conspiracy theories and punching down on his favorite social network have consequences.
What Trump should say to them
By most accounts, Trump wants to spend this afternoon talking about creating jobs. That’s a discussion we need—the tech industry has both created and destroyed jobs in vast numbers, and the numbers haven’t balanced out evenly in many cities and states across the US.
Trump not only can cut executives off when they start warbling on about “disruption” as a good in its own right, but he’d also probably enjoy it.
Rob Pegoraro.
Culled from Yahoo News.
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