On March 22, the Valdai Club held a presentation of the report “Russia and the Competition of Technological Platforms: The Political Economy of the ICT Market” and discussed technological competition, which the discussion moderator, Valdai Club Programme Director Andrey Sushentsov opined would be a key focal point for the struggle between the great powers in the 21st century.
The co-authors of the report, Professors of St. Petersburg State University Stanislav Tkachenko and Andrey Terekhov, presented the main theses of their work. Professor Tkachenko stressed that the liberal economy can only exist in a situation where one of the states can and wants to perform the functions of a leader, implying, among other things, a willingness to open its own markets for other countries. At the moment, the United States is losing the opportunity to play such a role, which gives rise to both attempts to create a multipolar system and China's claims to a leading position. Against this background, the competition between technological platforms is developing alongside the competition between nation-states, creating favourable conditions for their business. Professor Andrey Terekhov, Head of the Department of System Programming at St. Petersburg State University and Director General of LANIT-TERCOM, supplemented this political and economic analysis with a story about the practical problems faced by the Russian IT business.
Vitaly Kozyrev, Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Endicott College of International Studies (USA), pointed out that the question of creating a single universal platform - a global digital ecosystem - does not yet have an unambiguous answer, whether from a technological or geopolitical points of view. Now this sphere is turning into a space of geopolitical confrontation, primarily between the United States and China, with the active participation of private technology companies, which leads to the formation of a bipolar system of technology platforms.
Answering the question of the moderator as to whether globalisation in the technological sphere will eventually persist or finally split into several systems, Andrey Bezrukov, Associate Professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) and one of the creators of Russia's technological sovereignty concept, noted that now the world is divided into techno-economic blocs. So far, two blocs have emerged - Anglo-Saxon and Chinese - together with a number of players who do not have enough resources to form a bloc on their own, but who value their independence and are not ready to merge into someone else's space. For Russia, this state of affairs means the need to find partners with whom it could be possible to share the costs of platform solutions and create common standards. This implies the need to develop technological diplomacy to create a common space of trust.
