Who Controls the Tweets?

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...

The Great Reframing: IG2DPE

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...

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...

ICANN’s Accountability and Transparency: A Retrospective on the IANA Transition

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...

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 End of Bottom-Up: The UN IGF’s “Leadership Panel”

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...

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: TikTok Again; Data Localization Fail; Europe Finds Regulatory Nirvana; Digital Advertising Competition

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...