Who is the colonizer and who is colonized?
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…
So Much for Global Governance of AI…
The Paris AI Action Summit was another expensive, flashy failure of multilateral global governance. It signaled the end of a short-lived attempt by liberal democracies to, as the Action Summit website put it, “shape an effective and inclusive framework of…
Is it time to privatize .US?
The US government has issued a Request for Information” (RFI) regarding the maintenance and management of the .US top level domain. Dot US is a country code domain (ccTLD) in a country dominated by generic top-level domains. Unlike the…
DeepSeek Disruption
DeepSeek is being portrayed as a wakeup call, but it seems American policy makers and tech companies are hitting the snooze button. That may not be the right metaphor. They are alarmed, very much so. But instead of waking up,…
Why a TikTok Divestiture Never Happened
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…
The debate over “multistakeholderism”
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…
Authoritarianism Goes Digital: The EUI Conference
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…
AI governance workshop summary
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…
Beyond Big Tech: A Manifesto for Big Government
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…
The Disappointing NETMundial+10
The NETMundial 10th anniversary event was held April 23 and 24 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. As we wrote earlier, “Netmundial was a transformative moment in global internet governance. Inspired by the Snowden revelations, and amplified by the U.S. government’s announcement that it…