Big Tech Is the West’s Surprise Weapon in Competition With Russia, China

Big tech companies face intensifying criticism at home over their influence in the marketplace and public square. But at the same time their role in Ukraine shows how they are becoming a key asset in the West’s rivalry with Russia and China.

Ukraine shares none of the ambivalence toward big tech of its Western counterparts. It awarded Google a peace prize for its help securing Ukrainian computer systems against Russian cyberattacks and for cutting some business ties to Russia. It later gave AWS and Microsoft similar awards.

In an interview in Davos, Switzerland, this past May, Mr. Fedorov said technology comes in two ideological paradigms. In the first, he said through a translator, “data are property of citizens themselves. The other paradigm looks at those data as the property of the state. This second paradigm, you can find it in Russia, in China.” Ukraine is throwing in its lot with the first paradigm, and that is reflected in the companies with which it does business.

Technology is often thought of as apolitical: Semiconductors work the same way in democratic U.S. and autocratic China. Yet how tech companies, especially in services such as social media and cloud computing, operate abroad might reflect the values and laws of their home country.

For example, social-media companies such as Google’s YouTube,

Meta Platforms Inc.’s

Facebook and

Twitter Inc.

are regularly pressed to take down or leave up certain content but are seldom ordered to do so by the U.S. government. When foreign governments do, they often resist.

Last year India’s government demanded Twitter take down posts protesting its agricultural policies. Twitter fought the order; the government responded by encouraging users to…