France's forthcoming SREN Bill could mandate web browsers to block websites deemed illicit by the government, setting a precarious standard for digital freedoms, warns Mozilla Foundation in a recent blog post. more
In 2019, two organisations - Public.Resource.org of Sebastopol, California, and the Right to Know GLC of Dublin - brought suit against the European Commission for violating the fundamental rights of citizens to access the standards they are required by law to know, and attempting to protect intellectual property by copyright which lacked originality because it was, inter alia, provided by public governmental and industry sources. more
The digital domain encompasses the different spaces and spheres we use to relate and interact with the people and things that surround us using digital technologies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR, as the globally accepted standard, should serve us as the guiding light when it comes to striking the delicate balance between our rights and responsibilities on and offline. more
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has voiced concerns about the European Union's proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), saying it could pose significant threats to open-source developers and cybersecurity. more
Calling all registrars! ICANN is set to launch the Registration Data Request Service (RDRS), and the Registrar Stakeholder Group encourages ICANN registrars to participate. For those who haven't been closely following ICANN policy, the RDRS is a step on the path of policy development working to bring our registration data processing requirements into line with data protection laws. more
The digital domain encompasses the different spaces and spheres we use to relate and interact with the people and things that surround us using digital technologies. The digital domain is not limited to the technologies itself, but it has an important ethical dimension that encompasses the values, principles and instruments that inform and govern it. Created by humans for humans, our beliefs, cultural backgrounds, and biases are reflected in the codes we write and the algorithms we create. more
EU lawmakers are pushing for additional negotiations to strengthen a proposed data transfer agreement between the European Union (EU) and the United States. They argue that the current agreement still has shortcomings that must be addressed. The potential delay in reaching an accord is concerning for the thousands of companies that rely on the agreement. more
I recently attended a workshop on Lessons Learned from 40 Years of the Internet, and the topic of the Internet as a Public Utility in the context of national regulatory frameworks came up. For me, 40 years is just enough time to try and phrase an answer to the big policy question: Has the Internet been a success in the experiment of using market forces to act as an efficient distributor of a public good? Or has it raised more issues than it has addressed? more
The UK's Foundation Model Taskforce has been established in response to the UK government's ambition to become a leader in the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI). The task force will be supported by £100 million of investment and will focus on building the UK's 'sovereign' national capabilities, so public services can benefit from the transformational impact of this type of AI. more
At regular intervals, I have discussed the cybersecurity situation in Australia. In those assessments, I wrote about my frustration that the previous government policies more or less resembled a fire brigade approach. Trying to address individual incidents with regulations and legislation rather than coming up with a holistic strategy. more
According to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the forthcoming UN World Summit on the Future", scheduled for September 2024, should adopt a "Global Digital Compact" (GDC).1 The GDC is part of the so-called "UN Common Agenda." The compact is expected to "outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all" and to cover issues as digital connectivity, avoiding Internet fragmentation, providing people with options as to how their data is used... more
There is an interesting recent discussion in Europe about net neutrality that has relevance to the U.S. broadband market. The European Commission that oversees telecom and broadband has started taking comments on a proposal to force content generators like Netflix to pay fees to ISPs for using the Internet. I've seen this same idea circulating here from time to time, and in fact, this was one of the issues that convinced the FCC first to implement net neutrality. more
The UK's communications watchdog, Ofcom, has proposed referring Microsoft and Amazon to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for further investigation into their dominance of the cloud computing market. more
The EU is proposing a telecom-industry-backed plan to effectively tax Big Tech companies, with the intention of throwing that money toward Big Telecom companies for broadband expansion. The proposal is part of the EU's efforts to craft digital policies for the next few decades, with an eye on shoring up lagging broadband access. more
More than 1,000 experts in the artificial intelligence community have called for an immediate pause on the development of "giant" AI systems like GPT-4 for at least six months. more
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