The impact of social media on political communication remains a top concern worldwide. A request for comment on disinformation policy has been issued by the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression. Biden's incoming Director of National Intelligence is being pushed to support mandatory cybersecurity information sharing by the private...
Rightwing Twitter alternative Parler has become an important test case of the impact on free expression of service denials by private sector intermediaries. Parler’s status as a refuge for ultra-rightwing voices should not get in the way of an objective, long term appraisal of how social media content moderation and...
The Trump riots have stimulated a wide-ranging public debate about the meaning of free expression in the age of social media. A quick survey of the various sides and positions leads to a simple conclusion: in a political world, control of speech is not about basic rights or impersonal rules...
We focus on India and Europe, where frameworks for the regulation of non-personal data are emerging. We add a bit of SolarWinds followup, and peek at ICANN hiding in the corner Governance of Non-Personal Data Although most data governance efforts in recent years have been focused on the collection, storage,...
On January 6, 2021, President Trump and his far-right allies in the Republican Party tried to prevent the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s electoral college votes. It culminated in thousands of demonstrators violently forcing their way into the nation’s Capitol to disrupt the certification process. The protests that led to...
This time we analyze the SolarWinds intrusion and challenge some narratives being spun around it. We also look at Europe’s whirlwind of legislative activity in the EU around cybersecurity and the digital economy. And oh, happy New Year. It’s an idiot (solar) wind... The biggest event shaping Internet governance discussions...
During the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), IGP organized a panel discussion on The interaction of platform content moderation & geopolitics. The panel focused on how inconsistency in content moderation can reinforce existing power disparities, and make platform content moderation policies into a proxy battle among conflicting interest groups. The...
Many large American businesses – notably, Facebook and the intellectual property interests – are strongly interested in retaining free and unrestricted access to domain name registrants’ personal information (known as Whois data). As it became clear that ICANN’s multistakeholder process would restrict that access to comply with Europe's privacy regulation,...
Under Chairman Ajit Pai, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission made itself a tool of the Trump administration's assault on economic relations with China. One part of this was an attempt to expel China Telecom (Americas) from the U.S. market. The FCC issued an order to China Telecom of the Americas (CTA)...
The Narrative is a twice-monthly survey of key developments in Internet governance. This time we explain how the American National Defense Authorization Act contains some highly undesirable internet governance measures and survey the geopolitics of 5G. The Militarization of Everything The American National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) authorizes nearly $750...
“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.”
