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Big Tech tries to butter up Trump again

by on20 June 2017


Not Zuckerburg or Musk


Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley descended on the White House yesterday for the first meeting of the American Technology Council.

Apple's Tim Cook, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz were among 18 tech executives and investors who met the Trump administration.

What is really more likely is that the they are brown-nosing their way to lucrative US government contracts which are up for grabs as the government upgrades its computing systems.

However, there is a week of working sessions and conversations about modernising the government's systems, cybersecurity, the H-1B visa programme, talent recruitment and other issues.

Facebook Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg gave the latest meeting a miss saying they were washing their hair that week...er "prior scheduling conflicts". Also missing at the meeting was Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who recently quit Trump's economic advisory council after Trump decided to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord. Uber's Travis Kalanick, who stepped down from the council earlier this year following protests by employees and users, also did not attend.

Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner welcomed the executives to the White House saying: "We will unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services in a way that has never happened before."

Kushner took time out from his busy schedule of defending himself against allegations in the Russian probe. He heads the White House Office of American Innovation.

His idea is to consolidate most of the government's costly 6,100 data centres onto the cloud.

Of course this will make it easier for spooks and hackers to snuffle but at the moment some Pentagon legacy systems still rely on floppy disks which makes the material difficult for hackers to read.

The federal government spends more than $80 billion in IT every year, excluding classified operations, according to a 2016 US Government Accountability Office report.

Trump said that the goal of the meetings is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government's technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens.

"Government needs to catch up with the technology revolution. We're going to change that with the help of great American businesses like the people assembled.

"We have approximately $3.5 trillion of market value in this room — but that's almost the exact number that we've created since my election," he said to laughter from the attendees, which shows what sort of brown-nosing is going on at this event.

Last modified on 20 June 2017
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