At first, there was a reason to feel optimistic about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Mr Musk seemed to be interested in disrupting a cross-firm, collusive, and overly restrictive equilibrium on the standards and norms of social media content moderation. While I understand that the scope and value of “free...
November 1, 2022 The Twitter Acquisition Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, by threatening to upset the social media status quo, has kicked off a rambunctious but mostly healthy controversy in the US about the role of content moderation in the ”public square.” In a separate blog post, Milton Mueller explains...
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter last week. This process was accompanied by a fascinating public process, which reveals how politicized and polarized American social media have become. We have two factions competing for power; one has captured the Democratic party, the other has captured the Republican Party. The...
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...
September 1, 2022 Impartiality in Content Moderation (!) Post-2016 hysteria about “information warfare” - which should be labeled foreign influence operations (IO) - created serious concerns that U.S.-based social media platforms would collaborate with the U.S. government to censor foreign information sources that contradicted our state’s foreign policy narratives. Because...
A Chinese law that went into effect six months ago required online service providers to file details of the algorithms they use with China’s centralized regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). In mid-August, CAC released a list of 30 algorithms used by companies such as Alibaba, TenCent and Douyin,...
June 30, 2022 IGP’s Annual Conference We’ve extended the deadline for submitting proposals to our annual workshop: From Internet Governance to Digital Political Economy. The event will be held in The Hague, October 17-18 and will feature presentations on redefining the field, the political economy of data, export controls on...
June 1, 2022 Trust in Aadhar deteriorates India’s long-running experiment with digital identity is still controversial. On May 27, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) issued a notification asking people to not share photocopies of their Aadhaar card as it could be “misused”. Yes, 13 years after Aadhaar was...
On April 28 the United States released the result of its attempt to rekindle a positive vision for Internet governance. It is called “A Declaration for the Future of the Internet” and has been endorsed by about 60 countries. How it evolved Let’s talk first about the background of the...
After two weeks of drama, Elon Musk got Twitter’s management to accept his buyout offer. In a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion, Twitter will become a privately held company wholly owned by Mr. Musk. This is more than a business story. In a policy environment shaped by crusades calling for more...
“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.”
