During the Biden administration, public relations writer Michael Shellenberger testified before that House that “American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite.” This “global censorship-industrial complex” was defined as a network of collaboration between government agencies, technology companies,...
In September 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom asked prominent researchers at Stanford, UC Berkeley and the Carnegie Endowment to prepare a report to help the State develop responsible guardrails for the deployment of Generative AI. Gov. Newsom's action followed in the wake of his veto of SB 1047. SB 1047 would...
Review City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule Ho-Fung Hung. Cambridge University Press, 2022. It takes time to digest the meaning of an event of such monumental geopolitical importance as Hong Kong’s revolt against Chinese rule from 2003 to 2020. There is much talk about colonization and decolonization,...
As this gets published we are about 18 hours away from TikTok going dark. From the standpoint of global Internet and data governance, the impending ban raises fascinating questions. If we look closely at how the US sought to ban a platform, and who pushed for it, and whether a...
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...
IGP is proud to serve as the host organization for a project on censorship funded by the U.S. Open Technology Fund (OTF). Karan Saini, an Indian citizen working in Delhi, is researching DNS-based web censorship. The 18 month project will involve collecting large-scale DNS measurements, both direct and remote, across...
In its December 6, 2024 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit played Grinch. Not only did it issue a sloppy, poorly reasoned verdict upholding the government's TikTok ban, it refused to extend the divest-or-die deadline by a few weeks so that the case could...
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...
The image projected by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger summed up the AI governance dialogue perfectly. It was a gigantic motorcycle driver barreling around a curve. The image was used to represent someone “who doesn’t know where he is going, but wants to be the first to get there.” To the 30 attendees...
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...
Declaring Independence in Cyberspace tells the story of the struggle between governments and the global Internet community over control of the Internet registries (IANA). It offers new insights into a pressing question with profound implications: is state sovereignty the immutable foundation of global governance, or can new technological capabilities change the model?
“This is a book that needed to be written, and no one is better placed to write it than Milton Mueller. This full, rigorous account provides researchers and policymakers with a precious resource on global internet governance.”
