March 1, 2023 TikTok Ban would repeal free speech protections A House Committee is set to vote on their attempt to ban TikTok. The bill empowers the president to impose sanctions on any entity that operates a “connected software application” subject to the influence of China, but tries to skirt...
February 16, 2023 The search landscape is shifting Search platforms are in fierce competition to integrate large language model-based generative AI in an effort to better understand users’ natural language queries, provide more informative search results, and differentiate in other regards (e.g., accuracy, privacy). Most attention has focused on Microsoft...
February 2, 2023 DoJ’s pointless swing at Google adtech On Jan 24, the Justice Department, along with the Attorneys General of eight states, filed a civil antitrust suit against Google for monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology products, including its ad publisher, exchange, and advertiser network platforms. The complaint is the...
According to the Atlantic Council’s tracker, 17 countries currently have their Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the pilot phase and 11 countries have rolled it out, with several others in either research or development stage. Three key drivers of interest for the central banks around the world to propose...
January 16, 2022 IGP paper on TikTok makes waves On January 9 IGP released a threat analysis of TikTok that debunked claims that the popular short video app is a national security threat. Until now, the “ban TikTok” debate has never been subjected to critical scrutiny, and no one has...
A new research paper by IGP conducts the first thorough national security threat analysis of TikTok, given recent drives to ban the application entirely from the US market. A bipartisan group of China hawks in Congress and a couple of government agencies have argued that TikTok is a Trojan horse...
We speak endlessly of the value of "data" in the digital economy, and the platforms' alleged "extraction" of value from it. But this emphasis on data, data, data can be misleading. Platforms compete for users, for larger "audiences," not for "data." I say "audiences" for lack of a better word....
December 15, 2022 US-EU Data Privacy Framework Moves Forward The European Commission published a “draft adequacy decision,” about the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. In a largely unheralded but highly consequential decision, the US committed itself to privacy protections for European citizens in an October Executive Order from the Biden administration....
These are the thoughts I had after participating in the UN Internet Governance Forum last week. The 2022 IGF's big themes turned out to be "fragmentation" and "digital sovereignty." This was encouraging, because it shows the IGF is focusing on real problems and not inoffensive, forgettable slogans like "Resilient Internet...
UN IGF meets in Addis Ababa The UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) convened this week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, using a fully hybrid format. Avoiding Internet fragmentation and digital sovereignty are two of the most popular topics, along with a somewhat contradictory combination of calls for controlling & regulating AI...
“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.”
