Bailouts come in various flavours. Less than a week ago, I had made the following post:
Today the bailout is in place. History is replete with such bailouts. Whether it is for failed banks in 2008 or for a failed semiconductor company more recently.
However bailouts neither make a company nor save a company. They merely postpone the inevitable. India too has many such examples – BSNL and Vodafone are two that come to mind.
There is a big difference though. Indian bailouts have been to keep the cartelised dominant players in check. Whereas in the U.S., it is to help companies propagate their failed business models elsewhere with the hope that they will recover the bailout amount and more. Neither though make business sense.
But what it also shows is something far bigger. And that is the declining role of space and defence in military. It is clear that the U.S. military or for that matter the Indian military is dependent on civilian technologies for its own use. And not the other way around.
This means terrorists could buy commercially available technologies and compete with the defence in areas like cybersecurity, defence and blockchain. And also in core technologies for biowarfare propagation, and more important for bio defence. The same is true of cyber attack and cyber defence.
The markets have long suspected that Microsoft in general and Gates in particular are an extension of the deep state. Hotmail was acquired to peep into people’s emails. Then Skype was acquired to stop their p2p service and replace it with a more spying ready server based service. Zoom had no ability to dictate so everything was compromised. Google is for sale – why would they discriminate against a juicy customer like the defence. Facebook and their buddy Cambridge Analytica managed to help change global leadership. It goes a lot further as soon as you go behind things that Google search hides (and for some strange reason ai does not find)
Unless consumers refuse to use bigtech services like YouTube or Google maps – our territorial integrity will always be in someone else’s hand.