Time September 16, 2019been through a lot of different ups
and downs as we’ve evolved, the
tech industry has evolved, and the
world around us has evolved,” says
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who
promoted Smith to his current role
in 2015.
It says something about the na-
ture of those changes that Smith,
since becoming Microsoft’s presi-
dent, has focused as much on exter-
nal relations as on internal strategy.
With public distrust at its peak over
the size, power and business prac-
tices of the tech industry’s biggest
companies, Smith has assumed the
role of unofficial global ambassador
for the industry. In the past year, he
has spent more than 100 days on
the road, visiting 22 countries and
pushing for collaboration between
governments and tech companies
to limit the destabilizing effects of
digital technologies.
Those efforts have produced
some high-profile results. In No-
vember, French President Em-
manuel Macron unveiled an inter-
national accord— championed by
Smith and signed by 67 countries
and 358 private companies and
entities—to promote “trust and se-
curity in cyberspace” and to protect
elections from cyberattacks. After
the March terrorist assault on two
mosques in Christchurch, New Zea-
land, that killed 51 people and was
livestreamed on Facebook, Smith
helped New Zealand Prime Min-
ister Jacinda Ardern launch the
Christchurch Call, an initiative to
eliminate violent- extremist content
online. As part of the agreement,
Smith worked to persuade social-
media companies like Facebook and
Twitter to pledge to remove extrem-
ist content as soon as it’s posted and
to report publicly on their progress
in doing so. “Brad was one of the
driving forces behind that effort—
he spent real time, energy and cap-
ital to bring it about,” says Senator
Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat.
Smith’s influence is well known
among tech-industry titans and
policy makers in Washington,
but he has wielded much of it be-
hind the scenes. He will step more
squarely onto the public stage with
the Sept. 10 release of his first book,
Tools and Weapons: The Promise
and the Peril of the Digital Age.
Filled with accounts of closed-door
meetings, from Microsoft’s board-
room to the West Wing to the Vat-
ican, the book shows tech leaders
trying to respond to a seemingly
endless series of crises: Edward
Snowden’s revelations of govern-
ment surveillance of private data
servers; Russia’s hacking and
social- media disinformation cam-
paign during the 2016 presidential
election; the 2017 North Korea–
sponsored cyber attack known as
WannaCry, which crippled hun-
dreds of thousands of computer
systems worldwide; the livestream-
ing of the Christchurch rampage.
The picture that emerges is of an
industry ill-equipped to control the
technologies it unleashed. Smith ar-
gues that the tech sector needs to
reform itself or risk having change
forced upon it. “Is our biggest prob-
lem today that the world is doing
too much to manage technology, or
too little?” he says. “I would argue
too little—and that, in fact, gov-
ernments are moving too slowly,Technology
not that they’re moving too fast.” In his book, and
in his increasingly high- profile public advocacy,
Smith appears as both an advocate for tech respon-
sibility and a voice of moderation in the clamorous
debate over regulating Big Tech. “Brad elevates the
conversation,” says Chris Liddell, a senior official
in the Trump White House and former Microsoft
executive. “He’s representing Microsoft, but also
sincerely trying to do the right thing for the tech
industry and for the country.”
Yet for a skeptical public, two questions im-
mediately arise. The first is whether Smith’s pre-
scriptions go far enough toward curbing the indus-
try’s power or remedying the damage it’s done to
consumer privacy, social stability and democracy
itself. Smith calls for “limited initial regulatory”
steps on digital- technology companies, while in-
sisting that “it is more than possible for compa-
nies to succeed while doing more to address their
societal responsibilities.” Critics say that’s just let-
ting the fox guard the henhouse. “It’s a simple fact
that technology has been weaponized by private
companies against democracy,” says Barry C. Lynn,
executive director of the Open Markets Institute,
a Washington think tank that supports antitrust
action against tech behemoths. “Corporations are
not people. They don’t have souls. They’re institu-
tions designed to make money. And the way the
government has always dealt with them is to regu-
late them to the point where they cease being dan-
gerous to the public.”
The second question is whether Smith’s efforts
do more to advance Microsoft’s interests than the
public’s. Though Facebook, Google and Amazon
have some policy goals in common with Micro-
soft, heavier government oversight of the Inter-
net isn’t one of them. Some see Smith’s support
for regulation not as an act of socially minded
corporate citizenship but as a strategy to slow
the growth of Microsoft’s rivals. “By taking these
high- profile positions, Microsoft is able to high-
light its own thought leadership and commit-
ment to individual consumers, while throwing
the competition under the bus,” says Dipayan
Ghosh, co-director of the Digital Platforms and
Democracy project at Harvard’s Kennedy School
of Government and a former Facebook employee.
Smith doesn’t dispute that claiming the high
ground has helped Microsoft’s bottom line. But he
believes that Silicon Valley’s new giants should learn
from Redmond, not fear it. “I think that Micro soft
offers both a cautionary and a hopeful tale. If you
don’t figure out how to make things work from a
broader societal perspective, you will pay a steep
price for many years,” he says. “But then there’s
the hopeful tale. We survived, and we’re doing
well. And one of the reasons is that we turned ourIf you don’t figure out how tomake things work from a broadsocietal perspective, you will paya steep price for many years.