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...
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...
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 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...
Proponents of the view that the U.S. is being economically victimized by China often complain that our market is open and theirs is not. John Lash, an analyst with Dark Horse, writes, “The conventional wisdom is that there is a substantial imbalance in the relationship between the United States and...
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...
Diverse Experts challenge national security rationales underlying US digital governance Since 2016, the United States has abruptly reversed its liberal policies governing the Internet, global trade and regulation in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector. This sea change in ICT policy rests on sweeping and largely untested claims about...
A new Presidential Executive Order authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to regulate U.S. investments in “countries of concern” (a nice euphemism that avoids calling China an "adversary"). The E.O. identifies three categories of “national security technologies” covered by the program: semiconductors and microelectronics; quantum information technologies; and artificial intelligence....
On July 3rd 2023, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced it will be controlling Chinese exports of gallium and germanium effective August 1st, 2023. With this new licensing regime, China is responding to the US government's (USG) weaponizing of semiconductor patents by weaponizing its own hold on rare elements and minerals....
The latest legislative atrocity to emerge from Washington comes from Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD), who have rounded up 10 other senators on both sides of the aisle to introduce a law called Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology – the...
“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.”