The Chinese government can inject itself into, and try to shape, home political discourse — at low price, and with plausible deniability. It can use its cyber capabilities to surveil journalists and activists overseas in order to repress criticisms of China’s rights report while stealing mental property that provides China a boost in the technology competitors. Beijing tightly controls its own info surroundings, which affords it a degree of immunity to info manipulation. And because authoritarian systems impose virtually no normative constraints on government deception, it can pursue these activities with relative impunity. Of course, all of this exercise is extensible to our worldwide companions. Synchronizing investment screens and export controls will be much less of a stretch.
People could argue that it would not make sense to name a cloud computing firm a software program company, but the arbitrary separations are a bit more manageable than the massive label …