August 15, 2022 How Not to “Compete with China” In the United States, “competing with China” has become the go-to way to frame domestic policy agendas. The problem is that nearly all of these policies are bad ones (see, for example, the CHIPS Act), that imitate Chinese state capitalism instead...
What do you do when the chips are down? Samsung warned that chip demand will weaken if the global economy downturns. Intel also reported disastrous quarterly results this week highlighting operational challenges and managerial missteps. Undeterred, among a wave of governments seeking to build domestic manufacturing capacity, the US Congress...
China Hawks Revive Trump’s Tiktok Gambit FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is trying very hard to revive former President Donald Trump’s TikTok ban. Even as the House January 6 Committee explores the details of a real threat to national security created by the very man who appointed Carr to the FCC...
June 30, 2022 IGP’s Annual Conference We’ve extended the deadline for submitting proposals to our annual workshop: From Internet Governance to Digital Political Economy. The event will be held in The Hague, October 17-18 and will feature presentations on redefining the field, the political economy of data, export controls on...
In 2018, violent clashes broke out between upper caste Hindu and Dalit groups at Bhima Koregaon village in India during an annual celebratory gathering to commemorate the historic battle between the castes which took place in 1818. In the aftermath of the clashes, the police investigation centered on the role...
Tracking, privacy and platform competition Can a platform offer zero-price services that simultaneously preserve user privacy and business relationships across websites/applications? This is a puzzle the major platforms are trying to solve. There are legitimate concerns on all sides with users wanting subsidized services without creepy tracking, and businesses wanting...
As Congress passes legislation designed to onshore and re-nationalize the production of semiconductor-based integrated circuits, the hype of the industry backers of this plan proclaims that “The Future is Built on Semiconductors.” Is it, now? It would be more accurate to say that the “The Present is built on Semiconductors”...
June 1, 2022 Trust in Aadhar deteriorates India’s long-running experiment with digital identity is still controversial. On May 27, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) issued a notification asking people to not share photocopies of their Aadhaar card as it could be “misused”. Yes, 13 years after Aadhaar was...
October 17 – 18, 2022, The Hague Conference Center, The Hague, Netherlands IGP will hold its 7th Annual Conference in October. We invite scholars and practitioners in business and government to join us in a wide-ranging exploration of its theme: "From Internet Governance to Digital Political Economy." What scholars and...
Unpacking the digital political economy As the summer begins, with long awaited in-person conferences and intensive research activity, we are busily developing the Call For Papers for our annual IGP conference for fall 2022, which will focus on the global digital political economy. What scholars and policy makers used to...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”