The Narrative: Orwellian redefinitions; Refugees from the UK Online Safety Law; Indian Platform Reg; the PNIF Mandate

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...

The Narrative: Shifting Search Landscape; Euro Digital Wallet; SEC Crypto Crackdown

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...

The Narrative: Google Antitrust Woes; TikTok & Project Texas; SWIFT for stablecoins?

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...

The Narrative: A new Chief Twit; India wants you to complain; KSA hurls a BRIC

November 1, 2022 The Twitter Acquisition Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, by threatening to upset the social media status quo, has kicked off a rambunctious but mostly healthy controversy in the US about the role of content moderation in the ”public square.” In a separate blog post, Milton Mueller explains...

The Narrative: Lots of stuff happening!

September 30, 2022 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is having its Plenipotentiary meeting in Bucharest. These four-year events are always redolent with claims that Russia and China will somehow use the ITU to “take over the internet” (despite the fact that the ITU has no power over...

The Narrative: The Ethereum Merge; Vietnam’s Data Localization

September 15, 2022 What’s so great about The Merge? Ethereum finally upgraded its Proof of Work architecture to Proof of Stake, thus completing what was commonly being called "the merge." Up until September 15, 2022, there were two chains running in parallel on the Ethereum network: 1) the Mainnet used...

The Narrative: US Psyops caught by US platforms; Paper trails vs E2EE; Another cloud over TikTok

September 1, 2022 Impartiality in Content Moderation (!) Post-2016 hysteria about “information warfare” - which should be labeled foreign influence operations (IO) - created serious concerns that U.S.-based social media platforms would collaborate with the U.S. government to censor foreign information sources that contradicted our state’s foreign policy narratives. Because...

The Narrative: US in a digital currency race? India withdraws privacy bill; Apple hijacked by Russia?

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...

The Narrative: CHIPS Act passes; China’s new data strategy; Google & 3rd party cookies; India reconsiders data localization

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...

The Narrative: ‘Global’ data rules exclude China & Russia; India’s censorship; CBDC momentum

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...