Reports on the evolving digital political economy Human Authorship and AI Images A lot of bad policy about AI is being made because people are overstating its risks. These overstatements usually derive from overestimating the autonomous nature of the AI. Now we are getting some bad law for the same...
Reports on the evolving digital political economy Oral arguments in Missouri v Biden appeal On August 10 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit listened to oral arguments related to an injunction that restricts the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms to request suppression of constitutionally...
On July 3rd 2023, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced it will be controlling Chinese exports of gallium and germanium effective August 1st, 2023. With this new licensing regime, China is responding to the US government's (USG) weaponizing of semiconductor patents by weaponizing its own hold on rare elements and minerals....
The 118th Congress is set on addressing the regulatory vacuum around digital assets. Its April 19 inaugural session on “payment stablecoins” was covered in part 1 of this series, which also explained what stablecoins are and their implications for the larger macroeconomic system. With the debt ceiling controversy behind us...
"Digital" is often coupled with "transformation," and one area where its transformative powers are increasingly manifest is in finance and money. In this ongoing series, we will report on the US Congress's efforts to formulate digital assets policy. We use the term "digital assets" rather than digital money because it...
1 May, 2023 Who’s a VLOP and who’s a VLOSER? Alibaba, Amazon, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Wikipedia are among the entities that have been designated "Very Large Online Platforms'' (VLOPs) by the European Commission. Google search and Bing have been designated Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSErs). All will...
15 April, 2023 The AI Regulation Frenzy Technology panics now seem to go through fashion cycles. Last month it was Tiktok. The new trend in town is AI regulation. Would-be policy influencers are falling all over themselves to advance the idea that “We are hurtling forward in a way that...
March 16, 2023 New Dutch semiconductor export controls, a global regime grows In a March 8 letter, the Dutch Ministry of Economic and Development Cooperation and Ministry of Foreign Affairs notified the elected Parliament of its plan to implement additional export control measures for advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment, consistent with...
TikTok’s response to USG concerns about the imaginary threat to national security it poses was heard again at State of the Net 2023. It is hard to conceive of a more iron-clad technical solution than “Project Texas,” given the $1.5 billion that was sunk into it. Like the state it...
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...
“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.”
