The anti-tech bills currently being debated in Congress—the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open App Markets Act (OAMA)—would put American national security at risk, writes Mark Jamison, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, in an op-ed in The National Interest.

Jamison writes, “These bills threaten cyber and national security by opening the platforms and customers’ systems to intrusion by adversaries, restricting these companies’ abilities to continue to be world leaders in technology innovation, and weakening the U.S. information technology sector’s financial capacity.”

Here are the highlights:

AICOA and OAMA “severely limit” U.S. tech companies’ ability to innovate and “significantly undermine their efforts to combat cyber threats.” “These mandated business changes would financially weaken the U.S. information technology sector, severely limit these companies’ abilities to innovate, and significantly undermine their efforts to combat cyber threats and state-sponsored misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.”

Anti-tech legislation would have delayed “defensive measures” by U.S. companies fighting back against Russian actors during the invasion of Ukraine. “Consider what would have happened this year with the Russian invasion of Ukraine if the AICOA and OAMA had been in effect. The laws put little or no limit on the number of points where Russian actors could access the U.S. platforms’ computer systems, and each of these points is a vulnerability. By the time the Ukraine conflict started, the Russian actors would have already used their access to challenge the U.S. platforms’ security, features, and content. The U.S. companies would have been fighting back. However, U.S. regulators would be delaying the defensive measures by investigating whether they unduly discriminated against the Russian actors disguised as legitimate businesses struggling to compete.”

AICOA and OAMA co-sponsors have not addressed the numerous national security concerns. “The sponsors of the AICOA and OAMA have been dismissive of the national security issues. They should not. It is never a good time to put a country’s national security and industries at risk, but the rising tensions with Russia, China, and other tech-savvy countries make these legislations come at particularly bad times.”

See here for more from Springboard on AICOA’s national security concerns.