If we keep looking to please Donald Trump, the UK will miss out on state of the art technology
Last week saw two, apparently unrelated, clashes in the battle for dominance in the world of Big Tech, involving companies and governments which dominate the digital economy. Apple won one round of a complex legal battle with the European Commission to protect its use of low-tax jurisdictions. And Huawei lost out on UK business after the British government did a U-turn from its decision to allow limited Huawei participation in the UK 5G network. A perfect storm of Conservative backbench insurrection and US sanctions made the previous UK position untenable.
These clashes are skirmishes in a much bigger war for dominance of the emerging digital world economy and the new, overlapping, technologies within it: artificial intelligence; 5G; big data; advanced semiconductors; and quantum computing.
One aspect of this multi-faceted conflict is between the