Description

From 2016 to 2020, Jacob Helberg led Google s global internal product policy efforts to combat disinformation and foreign interference. During this time, he found himself in the midst of what can only be described as a quickly escalating two-front technology cold war between democracy and autocracy.

On the front-end, we re fighting to control the software–applications, news information, social media platforms, and more–of what we see on the screens of our computers, tablets, and phones, a clash which started out primarily with Russia but now increasingly includes China and Iran. Even more ominously, we re also engaged in a hidden back-end battle–largely with China–to control the internet s hardware, which includes devices like cellular phones, satellites, fiber-optic cables, and 5G networks.