Twitter’s Trump Ban Could Lead to Regulation Rethink, Says Hancock
The debate between ‘free’ and ‘civil’ speech has been raging over the past 2 weeks, since Trump was banned from Twitter for life and suspended by several other platforms. At least the pretence that these platforms are not arbiters of what the public sees, is now over.
At CFU we have been asking why regulators continue to utilise outdated, industrial age designations like ‘publisher’ or ‘platform’, rather than create newly defined, digital-age-fit, categories? This can be observed across the board and we flagged this recently with industrial age definitions of anti-trust.
Google Says it Will Shut Search Engine in Australia if Forced to Pay For News
In more signs of tech companies flexing their power – with geopolitical ramifications, Google has taken on the Australian government regarding this legislation, with the US government fighting its corner. What might be the unintended consequences of these legal fragmentations, along national lines? With China wanting its own internet, the UK breaking away from GDPR (eventually) and other countries wanting to exert similar local controls, is this tech’s ‘death tech by million cuts’? Not only does this ring-fencing create alternate realities for citizens, but the business costs are prohibitive. Is there a set of global principles that all can agree to?
Moon’s Party Seeks to Force Korean Tech Giants to Share Profits
A notable emerging school of thought around rendering technology companies who have been massive winners in the Covid-19 era, share profits with those doing less well: in other words, another form of redistribution. As inequalities rise, politicians will be looking for ways to rebalance, without dipping into increasingly scarce government resources. This comes back to a recurrent theme we’ve been pondering: what is the role of a corporation, within its larger ecosystem?
US Has ‘Moral Imperative’ to Develop AI Weapons, Says Panel
The legal infrastructure underlying human rights, and war crimes accountability, require serious reassessment now, before the future arrives (if it hasn’t already). As we identified in our Pillars whitepaper, a slew of laws currently written for an industrial age are fraying under new realities of the digital age. It takes many years to design, approve and implement new laws, yet the technology is already here. How do we create more agile governance structures?
The Struggle Over Chips Enters a New Phase
A laudable overview by the Economist, highlighting escalating tensions concerning semi-conductor chips. It raises several key risks from supply chain bottlenecks to escalating geopolitical currents. From an ESG perspective, the focus rests on a reallocation of strategically critical manufacturing capabilities, and the reskilling and education infrastructure required to support that, primarily centred around robotics and process optimization. Clearly, this also has significant implications for multinational firms and their boards, in navigating the increasingly mine-filled grounds of explicit and implicit geopolitical tussles.