Industrial Policy vs. Digital Reality: How Data, Not Labor, Is Rebuilding the Rust Belt

This Palantir advertisement, displayed at the Detroit airport—a symbolic and literal hub of U.S. industrial manufacturing—makes a highly strategic and ideologically charged claim: “Palantir is Reindustrializing America’s Manufacturing.” The ad visually juxtaposes sleek, robotic car manufacturing lines with logos of firms heavily invested in AI, defense tech, and automation (e.g.,...

Unpacking US-China “Decoupling” in AI

This is a guest blog from two University of Manchester (UK) doctoral students involved in researching the causal mechanisms linking policy interventions to decoupling outcomes, with implications for innovation ecosystems and global governance. Earlier this year, the release of DeepSeek—an open-source large language model from China—intensified the technological competition between the...

OpenAI’s manifesto: Neo-mercantilism Enters Global AI Governance

It was probably inevitable, given the current world situation. In a filing with the US Office of Science and Technology Policy for the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan,” OpenAI played the geopolitical card, urging the U.S. government to ban its Chinese competitor. In what is becoming an increasingly tiresome trope,...

India’s Report on AI Governance Guidelines Development

The Internet Governance Project (IGP) filed these comments on the report of the Subcommittee on ‘AI Governance and Guidelines Development’ constituted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). General comments on the subcommittee's report  The term AI should more accurately be referred to as advanced machine learning. Machine...

Embarrassing the Future: TikTok Decision Turns on Data Collection

Today the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling upholding the TikTok ban. The Justices clearly did not understand the full implications of this decision, and admitted as much in the opening paragraphs of the decision:   “...we are conscious that the cases before us involve new technologies with transformative...

Authoritarianism Goes Digital: The EUI Conference

A conference devoted to challenging “digital authoritarianism” is something that IGP can certainly get behind. But what is digital authoritarianism, and was it really being challenged in Italy on October 28 and 29? At the meeting “Decrypting Digital Authoritarianism: How the Use of the Internet Can Threaten Democracy and Human...

Caught in the Crossfire: The Impact of Sanctions on Iranian Internet Users

In the digital landscape of Iran, citizens find themselves trapped between a hammer and an anvil—on one side, external sanctions crush their access to the global digital economy, while on the other, their own government’s policies lock them into a controlled cyberspace. This isn’t just about a fear of information...