Two events this fortnight remind us of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s wry epigram―the more things change, the more they remain the same. On Tuesday, in the biggest antitrust case of the century so far, US federal judge Amit P Mehta ruled that Google must hand over some of its data to “qualified competitors” in order to dilute its dominance in internet search.
And in Tianjin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin made common cause to form what is being thought of as a new front, a counterpoise to Western powers. What binds the three leaders is Russia’s need to sell crude and the others’ need to import Russian crude for energy security in the world’s most highly populated nations.
Most competitions and conflicts have been fought over energy, and the history of human civilisation is a constantly evolving map of pathways for the flow of energy and value. So, naturally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has developed into a global polarisation over Russian oil, which could lead to a reorganisation of the world order.
Meanwhile, the rivalry between the US and China finds its finest expression in the AI race, since silicon is the new oil―and the new snake oil, too. The US is throwing money and state resources at intelligent machines in the hope of dominating the commanding heights of a future digital economy, while the Chinese are focusing on developing currently viable applications that can immediately corner the market. It remains to be seen which model will win the tournament, but this much is certain: the data pipelines and gateways through which people access AI are going to be contested, and the Google case is a harbinger of tournaments to come.
The most widespread use of AI is now in search. People quickly discovered that voice prompts return better results than plain text or Boolean searches. In acknowledgement, Google now places its AI search results at the top of its result pages. Microsoft has integrated its AI into its Edge browser. It can see pages and tabs open in the browser and crafts its responses accordingly. In effect, the browser is a viewport looking directly into Microsoft’s search service.
It reminds one of the landmark 1998 antitrust case, US vs Microsoft, in which the company was accused of integrating the Internet Explorer browser too tightly with the Windows operating system. Since Windows enjoyed overwhelming market dominance at the time, the stratagem allowed the company to steer information flows over the internet.
As AIs become default gateways to the internet, taking over the role of search engines, one can expect similar contests over the distribution of data. The Silk Route, the Suez Canal, undersea cables, satellite networks, browsers, AIs―they’re all in the same asset class, really. Trade routes have been supplanted by supply chains and digital networks, and they are worth fighting over.
So is energy, which has been fought over even before industrial times, by means of slavery, for instance. The slave was a unit of energy with manual dexterity built in, which could perform complex tasks beyond the powers of a modern assembly line robot. One of the earliest uses of programming was in textile weaving―designs were encoded in punched cards which told the Jacquard loom (1801) how to weave designs. But machines were no good at picking cotton or tobacco, which were classified as menial jobs and given over to slaves in the Americas.
The horrors of slavery illustrate how valuable energy can be in some applications. The system was hugely inefficient. European slavers who ventured into West Africa were mowed down by malaria. Millions of slaves died on the voyage across the Atlantic. And when they were put to work in the New World, they were not as productive as free workers. Depressed workers in poor health are not likely to be productive.
London imposed duties on sugar produced by free peasants in the United Provinces in order to keep Caribbean and American sugar competitive. This was to protect the institution of slavery, in which some leading entrepreneurs and financiers of Europe and Britain had made long-term investments. That was one reason why slavery lingered for so long, though it was a poor investment and inspired moral anxieties―like oil does today.
For decades, the world had been turning to green technologies and learning the frugal use of energy. But last year, while China sought to lead in the development of solar energy, the US became the world’s biggest producer of oil and natural gas. Behind its shabby treatment of India in the tariff wars is not so much concern for Ukraine as irritation, because if India buys crude from Russia, it will not buy American oil, which is far more expensive.
Take off the mask of political morality, and what remains is competition for energy markets. There’s also rivalry over supply routes like the Panama Canal, which the US has expressed an interest in acquiring. Meanwhile, China is building an overland ‘Suez Canal’ to connect it to Europe, and in the ether, AI is creating new networks of value which nations and corporations will vie for. The world may have changed dramatically in the 21st century, but the global contest is still over energy, value and their flows, and who must make common cause with whom to gain the lion’s share.
Speakeasy / Pratik Kanjilal
Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University