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...
Diverse Experts challenge national security rationales underlying US digital governance Since 2016, the United States has abruptly reversed its liberal policies governing the Internet, global trade and regulation in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector. This sea change in ICT policy rests on sweeping and largely untested claims about...
Dispatches from the evolving digital political economy AI Governance: Empty Gestures? The US government released an AI Executive Order October 31. The Halloween release comes after a year-long FUD campaign, backed partly by businessmen with a vested interest in AI, that frames AI as a frightening new technology that poses...
Dispatches from the evolving digital political economy NETmundial's 10th Anniversary: Inspiration or Nostalgia? At the Kyoto Internet Governance Forum, we learned that Brazil's CGI is thinking about holding an event to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the NETmundial event in April 2014. Netmundial was a transformative moment in global internet...
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...
“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.”