First and foremost, what has changed in the world is that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the peer threat pursuing a full spectrum of advanced military systems has all but disappeared. This is not to say that there are no significant threats to the United States from foreign sources who may benefit from enhanced computing capabilities, but these threats are not in the same league as the earlier possibilities for global superpower conflict. Taken together with the realities of technological progress and diffusion, this means that advocates of controls find it harder to justify the continuation of controls on the basis of specific applications that potential enemies might be able to pursue using computer products that might still be effectively controlled. Today, millions of microprocessors are produced each year with performance levels of about half to four times that value. Furthermore, there is now a greater division of value judgments within the national security group of stakeholders.
None gives it the same level of visible attention.
When computing was much more exclusively in the U.S. domain and these allies shared a common threat to survival, it was easier for all to agree to controls. In today's world, it is unimaginable how an effective unilateral control regime might be constructed. Turning now to stakeholders in business and industry, we can find several factors that expand the set of participants. One is that technological progress has been such that HPC, at least by the early 1993 export control definition above, is no longer limited to the extreme high end of the total industry product line. It now covers a substantial fraction of the computers in the world, and thereby many of the computer makers, a significant fraction of which are not on U.S. soil.