For the past four years, AFRINIC, the Regional Address Registry (RIR) for Africa, has been paralyzed by its legal conflict with Cloud Innovation in the Mauritius courts. The root cause of the conflict was a policy dispute over the inter-regional use of IP addresses. (see this article) Keep that root...
Two staffers at Article 19 Digital have declared that the AWS outage is a “democratic failure.” On its face, this is a really weird argument. What failed, exactly, other than Amazon’s DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1? How can a technical outage be a failure of democratic...
Inflated expectations, inflated assets, inflated capital investments, bad policy. It’s all got to end pretty soon. Artificial intelligence applications are everywhere. They unlock your phone, correct your spelling, redesign your slide presentations, recommend videos, scan and summarize reports and papers, converse with you. All these use cases are different, yet...
There are many reasons to be concerned about freedom of expression in America these days. But one of them, and perhaps the most insidious, is going under the radar. I am talking about the framework agreement under which TikTok’s US application would be “operated” and substantially controlled by a US...
It is a depressing sign of our illiberal times: the assassination of a right-wing youth organizer who embraced public debate and engaged in provocative free speech has provoked sweeping new threats to public debate and freedom of expression – from his own supporters. Even before we knew who the...
The dominance of the US dollar has been increasingly contested in recent times. Rising US debt levels, coordinated de-dollarization efforts among BRICS economies, and the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin raise questions about dollar hegemony in the digital age. A recent event hosted...
It’s time to realize that our industrial policy for semiconductors is failing. It was built on three pillars: subsidies to encourage re-shoring of fabrication, export controls that made trade in chips a function of our political alliances; and an attempt to maintain a competitive advantage in the digital by decoupling...
How does the digitization of money intersect with financial governance? This is an issue IGP has been working on since 2021. On August 7, two webinars hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies will bring our work directly into the policy discussion. A white paper released by the Internet Governance...
What should become of the World Summit on the Information Society? The WSIS+20 review process, culminating at the UN General Assembly in December 2025, will assess progress made since the original WSIS and chart a course for its future. The UN is preparing a "Zero draft" and asked for comments...
A review of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee Patrick McGee has written a splendid business history that also manages to wade into geopolitics in a misguided way. The book’s underlying focus is the transnational division of labor that evolved in the digital electronics...
Declaring Independence in Cyberspace tells the story of the struggle between governments and the global Internet community over control of the Internet registries (IANA). It offers new insights into a pressing question with profound implications: is state sovereignty the immutable foundation of global governance, or can new technological capabilities change the model?
“This is a book that needed to be written, and no one is better placed to write it than Milton Mueller. This full, rigorous account provides researchers and policymakers with a precious resource on global internet governance.”
