Mandated Interoperability/ Cybersecurity: The Fateful Tradeoff Underlying the Crowdstrike Incident

We’ve learned a lot in the last ten days about the software update from Crowdstrike that crashed approximately 8.5 million Windows-based PCs. In retrospect, 8.5 million is a fairly small portion of the global Windows environment, 7 or 8% (according to MSFT less than 1% of Windows machines were impacted),...

The Power to Govern Ourselves: (Multi)Stakeholders, States and Collective Action

The following is the text of the Keynote speech delivered at the GigArts 2024 conference, The Hague, Netherlands, June 4, 2024.  We now have almost 30 years of experience with so-called multistakeholder governance. Sometimes it’s called the multistakeholder model. Sometimes it’s the “multistakeholder approach.” Sometimes, it’s an “ism,” like communism...

Would LINE Become Another TikTok?

April 16, the Japanese government took action against LINE, the most popular messaging app in Japan, following a hacking incident in 2023 that compromised the data of 510,000 users. They issued unusual administrative guidance to LineYahoo, the company operating LINE in Japan, demanding a shareholder restructuring. This guidance called for...

Surprise! National Security Controls on Drones are Harming National Security

Many government controls on the digital economy are justified by national security claims. Too often, these controls are motivated not by sound cybersecurity principles, but by an archaic economic nationalism. The prevailing idea in the U.S. Defense Department, for example, seems to be that something “made in the USA” is...

Yes, it’s a Ban – The Real Story Behind the New TikTok Law

The US Government is seeking new authorities to ban TikTok as a national security threat. If it sounds like deja vu, that’s because it is. In the year and three months since our study debunking the claims that TikTok is a national security threat, no new evidence or arguments have...

The Dutch in the grip of Internet nationalism

The Netherlands has a reputation for being a liberal, broad-minded place that is open to the world. Its scholars in Internet governance have emphasized the need for a globally recognized “public core” of the Internet. But apparently the virus of digital sovereignty has affected a significant portion of the Internet...

Here’s why 2023 wasn’t a Happy New Year

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...