The first day of September this year marked the end of the sixth round of negotiations of the UN Ad Hoc Committee (AHC) on Cybercrime. The two weeks of debates and informal consultations concluded with applause. Despite all the efforts of the AHC chair and many delegations to bridge the...
March 31, 2023 The Tiktok hearing backfires As expected, Congress tried to turn its cross-examination of Tiktok CEO Shou Chew into a public stoning. Committee members (helped along by Meta lobbying) came in with their minds made up, refused to listen to anything he said, and repeatedly interrupted him. The...
The latest legislative atrocity to emerge from Washington comes from Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD), who have rounded up 10 other senators on both sides of the aisle to introduce a law called Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology – the...
January 16, 2022 IGP paper on TikTok makes waves On January 9 IGP released a threat analysis of TikTok that debunked claims that the popular short video app is a national security threat. Until now, the “ban TikTok” debate has never been subjected to critical scrutiny, and no one has...
A new research paper by IGP conducts the first thorough national security threat analysis of TikTok, given recent drives to ban the application entirely from the US market. A bipartisan group of China hawks in Congress and a couple of government agencies have argued that TikTok is a Trojan horse...
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...
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...
For the past year, IGP research has been exploring the interaction of competition policy and cybersecurity/privacy concerns, particularly as it pertains to the large platforms. We have shown how privacy and security have become product differentiators in the digital economy. As large platforms such as Apple and Google compete by...
Representatives of the Biden administration are now saying that its “Alliance for the Future of the Internet” will be launched "in coming weeks.” Despite our earlier article indicating that the initiative might have some promise, the more we’ve heard, the more pessimistic we are about it. The Alliance has three...
“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.”