At ICANN's 80th meeting, underway this week in Kigali, Rwanda, the board finally killed off an attempt by a few applicants for new Top Level Domains to use domain name registry contracts to regulate website content. Board director Becky Burr said that after consulting its lawyers, the ICANN board has...
The following is the text of the Keynote speech delivered at the GigArts 2024 conference, The Hague, Netherlands, June 4, 2024. We now have almost 30 years of experience with so-called multistakeholder governance. Sometimes it’s called the multistakeholder model. Sometimes it’s the “multistakeholder approach.” Sometimes, it’s an “ism,” like communism...
The NETMundial 10th anniversary event was held April 23 and 24 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. As we wrote earlier, “Netmundial was a transformative moment in global internet governance. Inspired by the Snowden revelations, and amplified by the U.S. government’s announcement that it would relinquish its control of ICANN and the DNS root,”...
Many government controls on the digital economy are justified by national security claims. Too often, these controls are motivated not by sound cybersecurity principles, but by an archaic economic nationalism. The prevailing idea in the U.S. Defense Department, for example, seems to be that something “made in the USA” is...
We'd like to make the debate over a TikTok ban a bit more informative than it has been. Because the current law in the U.S. Congress is an unprecedented assertion of government control over a social media app, the stakes are too high to continue with simplistic "TikTok is digital...
The US Government is seeking new authorities to ban TikTok as a national security threat. If it sounds like deja vu, that’s because it is. In the year and three months since our study debunking the claims that TikTok is a national security threat, no new evidence or arguments have...
Is censorship something that only happens when state actors do it, or can private actors engage in it as well? That crucial Internet governance debate is taking place in two venues: The U.S. Supreme Court, which will rule on two state laws that try to regulate the way platforms moderate...
The Netherlands has a reputation for being a liberal, broad-minded place that is open to the world. Its scholars in Internet governance have emphasized the need for a globally recognized “public core” of the Internet. But apparently the virus of digital sovereignty has affected a significant portion of the Internet...
Proponents of the view that the U.S. is being economically victimized by China often complain that our market is open and theirs is not. John Lash, an analyst with Dark Horse, writes, “The conventional wisdom is that there is a substantial imbalance in the relationship between the United States and...
The year 2023 was a notable one in digital governance. A retrograde tendency by nation-states to pursue “digital sovereignty” peaked in Europe, China and the U.S., leading to numerous governmental barriers and restrictions on data, networks, computing devices and software applications. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in natural language AI applications convinced the...
“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.”
