Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast

The Capitol Hill hearings featuring TikTok’s CEO lead off episode 450 of the Cyberlaw Podcast. The CEO handled the endless stream of Congressional accusations and suspicion about as well as could have been expected.  And it did him as little good as a cynic would have expected. Jim Dempsey and Mark MacCarthy think Congress is moving toward action on Chinese IT products—probably in the form of the bipartisan Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act. But passing legislation and actually doing something about China’s IT successes are two very different things. The FTC is jumping into the arena on cloud services, Mark tells us, and it can’t escape its DNA—dwelling on possible industry concentration and lock-in and not asking much about the national security implications of knocking off a bunch of American cloud providers when the alternatives are largely Chinese cloud providers. The FTC’s myopia means that the administration won’t get as m