The Narrative: Lots of stuff happening!
September 30, 2022 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is having its Plenipotentiary meeting in Bucharest. These four-year events are always redolent with claims that Russia and China will somehow use the ITU to “take over the internet”…
Apple and YMTC: Another “national security” risk?
Recently, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) decried that Apple is considering adding Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC), a Chinese state-owned manufacturer specializing in flash memory, to its supplier list for iOS-based devices. Today, bipartisan support exists…
The Narrative: Have we reached splinternet yet?
March 8, 2022 The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put global interconnection to the test as never before. Every media outlet is now talking about “Splinternet.” The ruptures extend beyond the internet and web to include many forms of cooperation…
ICANN, Ukraine and Leveraging Internet Identifiers
Ukraine’s representative to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) has sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to remove Russian-administered top level domains (.RU, .SU and .??) from the DNS root zone. In a separate…
SWIFT and Ukraine: Proceed Slowly
We are aghast at the suffering and destruction caused by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. A wide-ranging debate is occurring about how the world should respond, short of direct military conflict. There is a danger that in our moral revulsion at…
Biden’s Alliance for the Future of the Internet: Mandate for a Split?
Representatives of the Biden administration are now saying that its “Alliance for the Future of the Internet” will be launched “in coming weeks.” Despite our earlier article indicating that the initiative might have some promise, the more we’ve heard, the…
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…
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…
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…