The Chinese AI and venture capital community was shocked by Meta’s swift acquisition of Manus, an AI agent company from Wuhan, China, in a deal worth an estimated $2–3 billion. For Meta, this deal is its third-largest acquisition to date. It bets on Manus to win the "agentic" AI race...
IGP attended the UN General Assembly meeting in New York December 15 – 17, where a much anticipated “overall review of the implementation of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society” took place. The “high-level meeting” produced an outcome document that updates the WSIS consensus in the...
For the past four years, AFRINIC, the Regional Address Registry (RIR) for Africa, has been paralyzed by its legal conflict with Cloud Innovation in the Mauritius courts. The root cause of the conflict was a policy dispute over the inter-regional use of IP addresses. (see this article) Keep that root...
The CTO of Palantir Technologies Shyam Sankar recently criticized Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's idea that selling products in China would ultimately serve U.S. interests by making China dependent on American technology. Sankar argued that deepening economic dependence on China would only finance America's own destruction. Huang, for his part, has...
In mid-September 2025, U.S. and Chinese officials convened in Madrid for a high-level negotiation that yielded a breakthrough on the TikTok deal: a “basic framework consensus” for resolving the long dispute over the platform. This meeting marked the fourth round of China–U.S. trade and technology negotiations since Trump announced new...
Inflated expectations, inflated assets, inflated capital investments, bad policy. It’s all got to end pretty soon. Artificial intelligence applications are everywhere. They unlock your phone, correct your spelling, redesign your slide presentations, recommend videos, scan and summarize reports and papers, converse with you. All these use cases are different, yet...
There are many reasons to be concerned about freedom of expression in America these days. But one of them, and perhaps the most insidious, is going under the radar. I am talking about the framework agreement under which TikTok’s US application would be “operated” and substantially controlled by a US...
It’s time to realize that our industrial policy for semiconductors is failing. It was built on three pillars: subsidies to encourage re-shoring of fabrication, export controls that made trade in chips a function of our political alliances; and an attempt to maintain a competitive advantage in the digital by decoupling...
What should become of the World Summit on the Information Society? The WSIS+20 review process, culminating at the UN General Assembly in December 2025, will assess progress made since the original WSIS and chart a course for its future. The UN is preparing a "Zero draft" and asked for comments...
A review of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee Patrick McGee has written a splendid business history that also manages to wade into geopolitics in a misguided way. The book’s underlying focus is the transnational division of labor that evolved in the digital electronics...
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.”
