For the past 4 years, public policy toward “AI” has been driven by two competing narratives. In the past two weeks, the clash between them has blown up in the faces of policy makers and AI service providers, especially Anthropic and Open AI. Narrative 1 One camp told us that...
For about 50 years, consumers across the world could count on digital devices getting less expensive even as they became more powerful. Those days are over. The price of memory - not the fancy, most powerful semiconductor ships but the basic ones needed for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) in...
Across most of the developing world, the story of the last two decades has been a hopeful one: as people come online, the digital economy grows, services expand, new businesses take root, people make more money and lift themselves by their bootstraps. Tanzania was supposed to follow that script, but...
Back in 2023, the Future of Life Institute issued a open letter calling to “pause giant AI experiments” before runaway AI destroyed humanity. Three years later, machine learning applications have expanded in use and capability, yet humans are still around. Most AI doomers have retreated from saying that AI...
Congress has introduced another law tightening export controls on additional segments of the semiconductor industry (the MATCH Act). Like all the others, it is based on the premise that US technological leadership and national security is advanced by looking backwards and throwing obstacles at trailing China rather than running faster...
On March 23, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a Memorandum and Order banning the import of “covered” consumer-grade networking hardware. The decision demonstrates once again how the Trump administration's economic nationalism and its use of “national security” claims as a basis for arbitrary executive-branch actions are having disastrous...
There is a battle over the reputation of advanced AI applications going on in the news. Two worldviews conflict: Are we unleashing dangerous forces that threaten humanity? Or are we just making computers and software do a lot of new things? Two Wall Street Journal reporters fired a shot in...
Operation “Metro Surge” in Minneapolis-St. Paul, USA, has now attracted national and worldwide attention. Both sides in this conflict see it as a showdown. It is a showdown, and it matters who wins. In this blog, we try to focus on digital media; that is, on public narratives, propaganda, the polarization of...
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015) was enacted during a period of heightened anxiety over massive state-sponsored breaches and the burgeoning threat of global ransomware. Its architects envisioned a nationwide "digital neighborhood watch," where private companies and the federal government would swap "indicators of compromise" (IOCs) in...
IGP attended the UN General Assembly meeting in New York December 15 – 17, where a much anticipated “overall review of the implementation of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society” took place. The “high-level meeting” produced an outcome document that updates the WSIS consensus in the...
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.”
