[dadrian]

This is an unserious article.

1) If you're counting investment, you should count it in dollars, not number of investors or corporate entity locations.

2) This is missing at least two extremely well-known CNE vendors, which makes me doubt its accuracy.

3) The takeaway from the graph on Mythical Beasts [1] should be that the industry is _very small_, not that it's very big.

4) Americans should be happy that the US government is the biggest player. Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player? Get a warrant -> own a phone is a very straightforward process that fits into existing models of civil liberties in the US.

[1]: https://mythicalbeasts.atlanticcouncil.org/

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player?"

To be fair, an objective person might prefer to have _no_ "big players"

Whether a biased or self-interested commenter on the subject believes this is possible or not doesn't eliminate the possibilty of this preference

It is like asking whether a voter would prefer to have the "biggest players" giving funds to X candidate or Y candidate, ignoring whether the voter would actually prefer campaign finance reform instead

[halJordan]

You're not wrong, but youre showing an unserious idealism yourself. Your scenario is more akin to "i dont think there should be a biggest nuke owner, so we're going to pass laws banning nukes" While the USSR simply proceeds with making nukes.

[ASalazarMX]

At least there should be no government-sanctioned backdoors, let the attackers try to find zero-days on their own.

[potato-peeler]

> Americans should be happy that the US government is the biggest player. Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player?

People talk about US as if it’s some kind of lala land! Every country, every person should take active measures to protect itself from US influence.

[ASalazarMX]

At least the axe is one of us!

[dogleash]

>Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player?

If the absolute value of China + Russia + ME was the same, but US went down? Yeah, probably. Doubly so if sales going down meant less R&D investment and therefore lower quality software.

[lazyeye]

We also dont know how much money China is investing in govt spyware either.

I dont really trust the intent of any information I read online. This article could well be part of a influence campaign by a foreign power.

"Because if you talk about something the most, this means you have it the most.." is how most people perceive things. Of course, the opposite is often true.

[tptacek]

It also assumes we'd have records of investments outside the US/EU market to begin with.