Feb. 28, 2018, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement urging President Donald Trump and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to block the hostile takeover of Qualcomm by Singapore’s Broadcom:
“The federal government should immediately reject attempts by Singapore’s Broadcom company to acquire San Diego, California-based Qualcomm Corporation.
“National security threats take many forms, and one area of increasing concern is the attacks on U.S. companies who are instrumental in building the nuts and bolts of the modern Internet. Qualcomm, out of San Diego, CA, is one such company. The developer of both 3G and 4G technology, Qualcomm is at the cutting edge of creating the next technological leap to 5G. The future leap will see machines talking to and directing the activities of other machines pushing society into a world where driverless vehicles are the norm, and many aspects of life are literally on automatic pilot.
“Qualcomm is one of the companies most likely to create the software to make this system run, but China’s Huawei and South Korea’s Samsung are among those competing to be first. This matters because whoever wins the battle in developing 5G, will be providing the guts of the world’s industrial future. It can be expected that an unscrupulous company controlled by a foreign government would use this advantage to put backdoors into various systems making the world’s economy vulnerable to blackmail.
“Given the national security importance of Qualcomm’s continuance as a U.S. company, the federal government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, should immediately meet and block any takeover of the company by its foreign rival.
“In 2016, President Obama succeeded in giving away operational control over the Internet’s domain name system to a foreign focused vendor, now it is up to the Trump administration to deny the foreign takeover of the one company in America that is building the guts of how business will use the Internet in the future. With all the threats around the world, this little discussed one is as important over the long-run as the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and others. We simply cannot afford to have foreign governments through their managed corporations, have the ability to claim exclusive control the 5G technology that will be running the economy of the future.”
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