Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter last week. This process was accompanied by a fascinating public process, which reveals how politicized and polarized American social media have become. We have two factions competing for power; one has captured the Democratic party, the other has captured the Republican Party. The...
So, is it still “Internet governance” that we do, or is it going to be re-framed as “digital political economy”? IG or DPE? Our conference in The Hague hosted fascinating discussions on this question. The answer to the re-framing question can be summarized as “Yes, but...” Yes, re-framing IG issues around...
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...
IGP is pleased to report that we have received a $150,000 grant from the Internet Society Foundation to study the CA/Browser Forum and its governance of Web, Code-signing and other Public Key Infrastructures (PKI). We will be looking at PKI as a transnational critical infrastructure developed, operated, and regulated by...
Editors note: On the 5 year anniversary of the IANA transition, a group of people began collaborating on this report. It is being released in conjunction with ICANN 75 in Kuala Lumpur Keith Drazek, Verisign Jordan Carter, auDA Wolfgang Kleinwachter, Aarhus University, EuSSIG Milton Mueller, Georgia Institute of Technology Thomas...
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...
A Chinese law that went into effect six months ago required online service providers to file details of the algorithms they use with China’s centralized regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). In mid-August, CAC released a list of 30 algorithms used by companies such as Alibaba, TenCent and Douyin,...
Are you ready to be led? The United Nations Secretary General has appointed 12 people to its controversial “leadership panel.” The group is composed of prominent people, each with loads of honorary titles, fellowships and well-placed positions within business and government. What’s missing almost entirely from this group, however, is...
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...
China Hawks Revive Trump’s Tiktok Gambit FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is trying very hard to revive former President Donald Trump’s TikTok ban. Even as the House January 6 Committee explores the details of a real threat to national security created by the very man who appointed Carr to the FCC...
“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.”
