The Narrative: ICANN, ICANN and more ICANN
1 January, 2022 Happy New Year! To start off 2022 we look back – and forward – at the granddaddy of Internet governance issues, domain names. TLDs go Hippety Hop ICANN is embroiled in a controversy about approving the transfer…
IGP partners discuss the 2021 UN Internet Governance Forum
Jyoti Panday, Brenden Kuerbis, Milton Mueller and Daniel Perez Fernandez debrief on the 16th UN IGF. On the agenda: hybrid meetings, confusion about digital sovereignty, assessing multistakeholder initiatives in content moderation, the U.S. “announcement of a future announcement” of an…
The IG Narrative: Platforms, Payments and Privacy
September 16, 2021 App Stores’ Market Power Challenged Legal and regulatory actions are beginning to target the economic leverage of Apple’s and Google’s mobile app stores, but the cases make it clear that the conflict is primarily among competing suppliers…
A Fight Over Crumbs: The AFRINIC crisis
AFRINIC is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa: a nonprofit, nongovernmental Internet governance organization. Like RIPE, ARIN, APNIC and LACNIC, it operates a registry for unique internet protocol (IP) numbers that serve as network addresses. The registry records which…
The Narrative: Crisis at Afrinic; Apple breaks privacy; GIFCT participation
Crisis at AFRINIC The African Network Information Centre (Afrinic), the African regional Internet registry (RIR) for IP addresses, has had its bank accounts frozen by court order, crippling its operations. The Supreme Court of Mauritius ordered the RIR’s $50 million…
Why we need to start talking about neo-mercantilism
A forthcoming research paper from IGP examines the rise of trade barriers between the U.S. and China in the digital economy. (We presented a first draft of the research at our conference on Comparative Analysis of Platform Governance in the…
The Narrative: EU stands down; China cracks down; Cuba shuts down
July 16, 2021 US, EU converge on global taxation In a move with major implications for global internet governance, the European Commission “put on hold” its work on a digital services tax (DST) until October. The announcement came after the…
Comparative Analysis of Platform Governance in the U.S. and China
IGP’s conference on “Comparative Analysis of Platform Governance in the U.S. and China” brought together 21 papers and 30 scholars and policy influencers for three days of intensive (bilingual) discussion. Digital platforms and the data they generate are now the…
Chinese Data Nationalism Targets Didi Platform
A week after the close of our conference comparing platform governance in the US and China, the Chinese government took another strong action to subordinate one of its major private platform companies. This time it was Didi Chuxing, China’s dominant…
The Narrative: U.S. Congress “unites” against the platforms; Google (and the European Union) end cookies’ death sentence; Senegal’s data nationalism; China’s digital mercantilism
June 30, 2021 The USG goes after the platforms The attitudinal backlash against digital platforms (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter) has quickly been translated into public policy. The Biden Administration has appointed Lina Kahn, an Ivy League law professor…