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...
The contradiction between state sovereignty and cyberspace is the fundamental "Internet governance" issue of our times. Four years ago, I published a scholarly manifesto "Against sovereignty in cyberspace"in the International Studies Review. It was a systematically reasoned explanation of why cyberspace is a global commons analogous to the high seas,...
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...
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the annual program of issue-oriented interactions hosted by the United Nations, has formed a stable and solidaristic community. IGF is still the most diverse and relatively open, bottom-up vehicle for converging a global community focused on digital policy issues – and it has become clear...
A CircleID post by Alexander Klimburg takes aim at my article, "The Power to Govern Ourselves," delivered at the Gig-Arts conference in June. That speech, avaiable here on the blog, argued that "Multistakeholder does not describe a governance model. It never has. It was always a compromised Public Relations concept,"...
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...
The backlash against Big Tech has given political movements as diverse as populist nationalist conservatives and woke progressives a common cause. Occasionally political entrepreneurs try to catalyze a movement around this anti-Big Tech sentiment, writing manifestos calling for change. The latest one comes from a group called "People vs Big...
“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.”
