When the metaverse distributes authority across states, platforms, protocols, and communities simultaneously, the only viable response is a governance framework that allocates functions across all four layers rather than insisting, against the evidence, that any single actor holds the reins.
News and Research articles on Digital sovereignty
Digital sovereignty is vague, or even fragmented, but that is not a defect to be disciplined.
As the Gulf war pushes data embassies into the mainstream, the Global South risks importing a familiar pattern of dependencies repackaged as sovereignty.
The next frontier of South-South cooperation may not be trade agreements or diplomatic summits; instead, it may be what governments choose to buy, and on whose terms.
Europe has built the most sophisticated democratic response to internet fragmentation and is now dismantling it under pressure from the platforms it was designed to constrain.
This opinion piece critically examines the EU’s strategy to build AI infrastructure through the announced AI Gigafactories as alternatives to hyperscalers and leading means to strengthen its digital sovereignty.
Latin America's data centre boom reveals that digital sovereignty depends less on legal declarations than on states' operational control over energy, water, and exit rights.
In the shadow of missiles and malware, the open internet becomes the first casualty of survival.
This article explores how governments, shifting from an anti-interventionist stance and views of regulatory impossibility, are embracing an infrastructural turn through strategies that include hijacking, and localising the "points of control" of the internet.
In this article, we analyse attempts to regulate and control TikTok through the lens of foreign interference and technological sovereignty in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union.
On 16 March 2023 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and the State Council formally released the plan on reforming Party and state institutions which was endorsed during the annual National People’s Congress in early March.
This paper is part of Governing “European values” inside data flows, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Kristina Irion, Mira Burri, Ans Kolk, Stefania Milan. Introduction Governments’ interest in the “datafied society” (Hintz et al., 2018) as an object of policy and regulation is nothing new, with a long-held recognition that governance protocols (policies, ethics frameworks, and regulations) can be used to reshape the technological infrastructure underpinning society and hence its nature (Floridi, 2018; van Dijck & Poell, 2016). However, the widespread adoption of the term “sovereignty”—a concept loaded with legal and political connotations—to describe authority over …
This essay analyses how the key concept of digital sovereignty has evolved into a discursive practice in digital policy worldwide.