YouSaid · the spoken record

David J. Kappos

lines on the record: 20
first: 2020-09-28
most recent: 2020-09-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And its role in administering these export control laws I talked about, the agencies that are part of this CIFIS process and the process by which the US government reviews foreign investment. I think all of them will become quite influential in incrementally but powerfully changing the landscape around tech in ways that will be quite tangible even if Congress doesn't have the capability and space to take up real legislation, the policy landscape will shift by virtue of who occupies these key seats and the directions that they get from the president. So it's really interesting thing to keep an eye on.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a potential for real bipartisan action, but I think regardless of who wins the election, there's just going to be a lot of other things that will take up the energy and time of Congress. I think all things being equal if you didn't have the limits of time legislatively and all the problems that comes with it in terms of getting real legislation through, there would be an interest in looking at Section 230 that we talked about. And there would be an interest in looking at the antitrust framework around not just tech companies, but antitrust generally. That's unlikely to happen just because there's so many more immediate things stemming from the economic crisis, the pandemic, and so on that will be the focus of whoever wins the next presidency. But so I think that ultimately it boils down to something that you and I know from our times in Washington, which is ultimately your people or your policy. And I think whoever gets appointed into some of these key seats in government at the Justice Department and the antitrust role at the Federal Trade Commission, the federal communications commission, the commerce department.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one theme throughout this conversation is that the policy issues in the tech space don't necessarily fall neatly along partisan lines. And it's kind of interesting this time when virtually every issue seems to be completely polarized that technology policy”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Currency, and can they police ultimately elicit activities if all payments go digital? All of these topics that I just talked about are enormously interesting. It's not something that's immediately playing itself on the United States. I think the Federal Reserve has said in Treasury endorses the idea that we're not quite at a point where the U.S. needs to adopt such an innovation because banking services are pretty available and the transfer of money is pretty easy within the United States. But for other countries, it's a really central issue and it'll play itself out over the next few years and a big prominent way.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Receive and send money securely, and it's a huge developmental step forward, a really exciting thing. In that context, central banks are now looking at whether they should take their own currency, their own sovereign currency, and create digital forms of it to essentially help in this process by which people can make payments. And they're doing this partly for proactive reasons because they think it's a good public policy thing for the reasons I talked about. But they're also doing it partly defensively because there's been a number of private groups that have come together and created their own alternative forms of digital currency. And so there's a bit of a push and a pull going on in the central bank community as they do a lot of work individually and through these multilateral standard-setting bodies to try to figure out what a central bank digital currency should look like, how they would work, what it would do to the legacy incumbent banking system, whether it could survive the creation of a digital.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you had to boil it down, fintech, which is a gigantic landscape into a single theme, it has to do with a theme of payments. How do you facilitate better and easier and more secure and cost-effective ways for people to essentially transfer money from one location to another, in particular to transfer it across borders? Because for all the innovation that's occurred in every area, including financial services, it's an extraordinarily expensive and cumbersome process for individuals who transfer money from one country to another. And it's often the people who have the least means who are most caught by this. And so a lot of the interesting innovation in fintech, as you mentioned, has been in the payment space in places like Africa, in China, where mobile phones and mobile platforms have become essentially online banks where people who've otherwise don't have access to financial services or banking services all of a sudden at their phones have the ability to”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One part of the technological landscape where China arguably has an advantage or at least broader adoption is in the area of fintech, mobile payments much more common and more advanced in China, mainland China than they are in most of the West. How is the fintech debate? I know it's a big field and hard to capture in a couple sentences, but how is the debate around digital currencies and the role of central banks playing out? It used to be that the debate was around the dollar and dollarization of the global economy and can the Reninbi be a counterpart to that. But how does the debate look around emerging currencies and financial technology?”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does, but there have been a number of measures that the Trump administration has implemented, again, with strong bipartisan support to restrict the export of U.S. semiconductors and also even to restrict the export of goods produced on semiconductor manufacturing equipment made in the United States. Now, that sounds like a really arcane point I just made or distinction that I made, but it's a really interesting extension of U.S. jurisdiction in the export control space that is raising all sorts of issues, legal issues, but also geopolitical issues about how much control can the US exercise over things that at one time were American and whether other countries will go along with that. And at this point, it's a really interesting area that will become a central part of how this administration will conduct its foreign policy in a potential second term or how Vice President Biden, if he were to become president, will have to conduct his policy because it'll be a big theme in our dialogue with China, but also...”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the predicate for the debate around semiconductors is very much on the idea that technology is essentially become so integrated in every aspect of our national security apparatus, our defense intelligence capabilities, but it's become integrated in every aspect of our economy. And so the ability, and at the center of that is our semiconductors or the computing capability that allows us to bring technological innovation to everything, to services, to manufacture goods and everything in between. And so a lot of the interesting work that's happened in the space in terms of these controls relates to the semiconductor area because it's an area that China has enormous interest in developing, partly because they're a manufacturing platform for a lot of electronics, but also because they're developing a lot of indigenous capabilities. And also as their economy modernizes and develops, they need semiconductors for their development just like every other.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arguably one foundational technology is hardware. I mean, hardware has been around for a long time, and semiconductors in particular, while they don't get as many headlines as social media companies, they play a really critical role in a lot of industries. What's the policy debate regarding semiconductors and infrastructure type technology”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Real in the sense that policymakers are quite But it raises really hard questions what is a foundational technology? What is an emerging technology? Is there a point at which an emerging technology ceases to be emerging and then is it okay to export? What exactly is the risk that we're controlling for? These are really, really hard questions, but the work that the administration is doing in trying to figure that out is not something that's causing any kind of partisan divide in Washington. I think there's a lot of interest on both sides to figure it out and get it right. And I think the Biden administration, if there is one, will essentially continue the work that the Trump people will leave them when they take over.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one specific issue in the National Security Space is around the potential for espionage. And sometimes the conversation is so driven by what seemed like competitive concerns, like we want U.S. technology to be superior to Chinese and other technology. But there's been a dominant conversation for a while now around the potential for espionage or the potential for spying by state-owned companies in China or companies that have state influence. Is that concern real or is that just a way of really dressing up what is really a competitive concern?”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In China, but also has a bit of a foothold in the US market as well. And in both those cases, the reasons that the president gave and his executive orders really related to access to information, the ability to monitor people's activities, and these were deemed to be of such a grave national security risk to the interests of the United States that the president proposed that essentially any transactions with these companies would be banned at a date certain. Now, we're waiting to see what exactly that means in terms of tangible specifics regarding what the ban should actually look like, but something's coming and it's quite great based on this new paradigm we're talking about.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An enormous evolution of what constitutes national security risk over the last several decades since you were in government, since I was in government. There used to be a traditional sense that national security related to things where if a bad foreign actor could use whatever the thing is to disrupt or otherwise harm our economy. And now the concept of national security has become much more difficult to pin down. There's a lot of concerns about influence, access to data, information, and what have you. And so that new paradigm of national security is really playing itself out in some of the headlines that we're seeing, including two recent executive orders that the president issued targeting bite dance and their TikTok platform in the United States, but also Tencent and other Chinese company and their WeChat online platform. It's a communications century Facebook messenger combination platform that's quite pervasive.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another piece of tech, and this is more around that infrastructure side of tech and less around the social media companies, but there's some chatter about that is national security. And there's been this concern really from this administration, but it predates this administration. You should talk about that around national security implications of some of what we're seeing in the tech sector. So, I mean, a lot of the headlines recently are about TikTok, which is the flavor of the day, but give us a broader scope around why the concern around national security and how that is playing out in the policy side.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About some of their online practices in terms of their search engine and what have you. And so that's a really pivotal thing. But I think as you look a little bit further down the road, particularly as we get into a potential Biden presidency, there's a broader look at the size of these companies, whether there's either revisions to the antitrust law that should be done to bring these companies to scale or whether there should be a new regulatory framework, which is what more progressives and Democrats talk about to oversee this sector in a more comprehensive way. And that really is playing itself out over time. It's not an immediate priority issue in terms of legislative actions. There's a lot of other things that are on the plate in Washington, and we'll certainly be on the plate for a new president, but it's an area that there's going to be a lot of action, I think, over the medium term for sure that's worth paying close attention to.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Public policy was very much organized around encouraging the development and growth of online platforms. It was a really important area of innovation in our economy over the last several decades, but we find ourselves now at a point where, as you said, the tech companies and the online platforms have reached a scale that was probably unimaginable a couple of decades ago. And so both sides really have looked at this issue and the current dynamic and thought that something needs to be done about it. But again, it's like a lot of things in the tech space where there's sort of general agreement at a very high level, but not a lot of agreement about where we land. At the moment, there's a lot of action going on in terms of antitrust enforcement. And the Attorney General himself, Attorney General Barr, the Justice Department, have said that very shortly, in a matter of weeks, they will announce a case against Google, which is currently facing investigations from 50 separate state and other authorities.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one thing that you see sometimes on both the progressive side of the Democratic Party and also the more conservative side of the Republican Party is this fear of big companies. And there are a few companies that are as big as the social media companies today and some of the tech companies, and they've gotten bigger post-pandemic. How is that sort of distaste for concentration and dominant market power playing out in the policy debate? I mean, both sides, as you said, have very different motives, but they both at some level dislike concentration and there's a lot of antitrust conversations going on in this space.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To censor content on their platforms or remove misinformation and then relate it to that as concerns about foreign government meddling in our elections through social media. And so there's just a lot of narrative around social media, although it's not strictly speaking an election issue. And a lot of this plays into this provision of logic that you're familiar with. This is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which sounds like an arcane provision of law. There's a really important legal provision put into that legislation that essentially shields the social media companies from liabilities for the content that's posted on their sites. And essentially it was designed to encourage the sort of media companies to engage in some moderating of content without facing the same type of liability that a news publisher would face. And so both the president and vice president Biden have both called for the repeal of Section 230, but for very different reasons that cut along the lines that I talked about.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting because social media is actually playing a pretty prominent role in the elections, but not necessarily as an election issue. And so it's not as though it's an issue on which voters are expressing a view and deciding which way they vote in terms of Democrats or Republicans. But nonetheless, it's a pretty prominent issue in the sense that it plays into both sides campaign's perspectives and narrative regarding how they reach voters and how the public discourse is occurring around the campaign. And so as a general matter, conservatives have a lot of complaints about social media, in particular arguing that the social media companies are restricting or censoring their views. There have been some high-profile efforts by Twitter, most notably to, you know, remove some of the president's tweets from their platform. And that's caused a lot of concerns on the Republican side for Democrats. There's a similar, but essentially opposite concern that the social media companies aren't doing enough.”
2020-09-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Battle for Our Screens, Part 4: The Moving Pieces of Tech Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT