Amid heightened geopolitical tensions and growing challenges posed by disruptive innovation, European policymakers are seeking ways to strengthen the continent’s strategic autonomy—particularly with respect to technology.  A key part of this effort is the EU Chips Act, which provides billions in financial support to set up factories for advanced chip production (so-called “fabs”) and step up semiconductor research in the EU. Just as U.S. policymakers are attempting to strengthen the American semiconductor industry via the CHIPS and Science Act signed into law on Tuesday, lawmakers in Europe are attempting to build a more independent technology industry. First put forward in April by the European Commission, the EU Chips Act aims to address semiconductor supply shortages and years of decline in semiconductor investment in the EU, boosting Europe’s share of global chip production capacity to 20% from its current level of about 10%. The act is expected to be adopted in the first half of 2023 and has already had an impact on major semiconductor companies’ investment decisions.

The EU Chips Act represents a leading example of initiatives to improve Europe’s strategic autonomy on a range of technologies. The act joins up political, industrial, technological, and financial support in a key technological area; presents a clear plan for industrial and technological capability- and capacity-building; and takes a realistic approach to partnering with like-minded countries to enhance strategic control of the semiconductor industrial ecosystem.

At a recent meeting of the World Internet Conference, attendees were treated to a preview of China’s vision of the internet. In a trailer showcased as part of the meeting, people walk around a futuristic city experiencing super-connected streets and underground spaces, robots and other artificial intelligence tools provide services, and everyone is connected via 5G networks. 

This is the future of the web that China is trying to sell the world, and the World Internet Conference, which took place on July 12 in Beijing, is the latest forum in which it is marketing that future. Now, China plans to turn this gathering into what is being called “the World Internet Conference Organization,” which Beijing hopes will displace existing multistakeholder bodies for internet governance and to advance its vision of authoritarian information controls in the process. While it is far from certain that Beijing will be successful in turning this new body into a successful vehicle for advancing its internet governance agenda, it should serve as a wake-up call for defenders of the open internet to modernize internet governance.  

Around the world, policymakers are grappling with how to address the spread of harmful content and abuse online. From misinformation, to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), to harassment, and the promotion of self-harm, the range of issues on policymakers’ plates are diverse. All of them have real consequences in the lives of their constituents—and lack easy remedies.  

Recent rulemaking and legislative initiatives, however, have seen a shift in how policymakers are holding social media companies accountable for the well-being of their users. From the United States to Europe, lawmakers are increasingly embracing the principles of “safety by design,” which aim to place accountability, user empowerment, and transparency at the heart of rules for online life.    

Safety by design offers a more proactive approach for policymakers to address ever-evolving online safety issues, even as these principles raise a new set of challenges. By embracing safety by design, policymakers can provide users with greater choice and understanding of how their online experiences are structured, granting users greater autonomy in mitigating online harms. But safety by design approaches also require careful balancing to preserve civil liberties and to ensure that they provide protections for all online users, not just the children whose safety concerns have come to dominate debates about how to regulate online life. Similarly, such rules need to be crafted in a way that provides consistent guidance for industry while offering a framework that is broad enough to be applied to future online social spaces—from live chat and video applications to the metaverse and beyond. 

When the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson first coined the term “metaverse” in 1992, the world of virtual reality-enabled computing that he imagined was still a long way off. But with virtual reality—and the computing infrastructure that enables it—making significant improvements in recent years, the interactive and embodied internet that Stephenson imagined is now closer to reality. Today, computer science researchers conceive of the metaverse as a “network of interconnected virtual worlds” using three-dimensional platforms where humans interact with digital content and with each other, forming an “ecosystem where digital and physical worlds collide”. By relying on a combination of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality to move from the 2D version of the internet to a 3D shared space, the metaverse aims at an internet that is interoperable and synchronous.  

The metaverse promises to connect devices to humans and humans to each other in ways that threatens to transform economic and social relations. As a result, it is critical that policymakers and technology companies collaborate to write the rules of the road for the metaverse. The potentially disruptive qualities of the metaverse are illustrative of how the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) will likely transform how humans work, entertain, conduct business, and socialize. The scale of this disruption means that policymakers need to adopt a proactive approach in thinking about how these technologies are likely to change our society rather than attempting to address harms once they are widespread. Especially given the recent drawdowns in the technology industry, the impending buildout of the metaverse also offers a rare opportunity to design a system that is more equitable from the start—in contrast to past paradigms like Web 2.0.  

At the end of March, hackers pulled off an audacious heist, stealing $625 million from the blockchain that powers the popular video game Axie Infinity. While not well-known in the United States, Axie Infinity is the most prominent and popular example of a new model for gaming, in which users get paid to play. This innovative play-to-earn business model gives players a financial incentive to stick with the game for the promise of regular income. It does this by minting non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, to represent the game characters known as “axies.” Inspired by Pokemon, the axies are digital creatures, each represented by an NFT that players can use for battle, cultivation, or trade. When hackers believed by the U.S. government to be linked to North Korea raided Axie Infinity in March, they wiped out many players’ earnings.  

Axie Infinity raises important questions about the nature of gaming, the nature of play, and the relationship of play to labor. To participate in the game, players must purchase three axies, whose prices can vary widely. In the last year, it has cost upwards of $1,100 just to start playing the game. Such a steep entry cost would be a barrier for any other gaming platform, but the promise of Axie Infinity’s design is how NFTs have created a unique economy in which players earn surprising amounts of income. The “play-to-earn” model, as it’s often called, has the potential to upend the economy of gaming. Axie Infinity takes a 17% cut from every transaction in the game, generating revenues of $700 million in 2021 (though those numbers have since sharply dropped alongside the collapse in cryptocurrency prices). Big tech funders have noticed. A recent $152 million capital injection into Sky Mavis, the developer behind Axie Infinity, valued the company at $3 billion.  

NFTs ostensibly create a chain of unique ownership for digital assets, but by manipulating consumers and companies into approving trades they don’t understand, hackers can infiltrate this chain and redirect the money to themselves, allowing half a billion dollars vanish from the wallets of unsuspecting players. The Axie hack is indicative of the risks built into the evolving nature of video game marketplaces and demonstrates the need for regulators to implement better monitoring and consumer protection schemes. 

Users come to search engines seeking honest answers to their queries. On a wide range of issues—from personal health, to finance, to news—search engines are often the first stop for those looking to get information online. But as authoritarian states like China increasingly use online platforms to disseminate narratives aimed at weakening their democratic competitors, these search engines represent a crucial battleground in their information war with rivals. For Beijing, search engines represent a key—and underappreciated vector—to spread propaganda to audiences around the world.  

On a range of topics of geopolitical importance, Beijing has exploited search engine results to disseminate state-backed media that amplify the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. As we demonstrate in our recent report, published by the Brookings Institution in collaboration with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, users turning to search engines for information on Xinjiang, the site of the CCP’s egregious human rights abuses of the region’s Uyghur minority, or the origins of the coronavirus pandemic are surprisingly likely to encounter articles on these topics published by Chinese state-media outlets. By prominently surfacing this type of content, search engines may play a key role in Beijing’s effort to shape external perceptions, which makes it crucial that platforms—along with authoritative outlets that syndicate state-backed content without clear labeling—do more to address their role in spreading these narratives.  

Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural sector is widely recognized to have vast, under-utilized potential. Land and labor productivity are low compared to other regions and have barely increased over the last 20 years. Low productivity has created widespread rural poverty and food insecurity, so the potential for productivity increases represents an opportunity to boost inclusive growth.

Scholars, development organizations, and some entrepreneurs have identified digital technologies associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution—the broad shift toward greater machine autonomy, improved analytics, greater connectedness, and advanced robotics—as one potential path toward overcoming these productivity challenges. Anecdotal evidence from well publicized start-ups—such as Hello Tractor, a tractor-sharing platform started in Kenya, and Zenvus, a Nigerian soil mapping company—have fueled a narrative that digital agriculture represents the key to delivering productivity gains to African start-ups. Yet as a recent FAO report admitted, hard evidence that digital agriculture is delivering on this promise is difficult to come by, as long-standing challenges persist in preventing to unlock fully the potential of these technologies.

In a recent report, we use new data and trends in output and employment, review the main productivity issues that are preventing transformation in the African agricultural sector, and ask how Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies might address them and unlock better job opportunities. The optimistic narratives around African farmers’ adoption of technology often overlook the more long-standing challenges they face that are preventing the adoption of much older productivity-increasing technology, such as fertilizers and conventionally produced hybrid seeds. For digital agriculture to be effective and transformational in Africa, a concerted effort to address Africa’s long-standing agricultural productivity challenges is needed.

Data drives development policy. To determine aid packages and projects, policymakers need good data on everything from population to urban sprawl to economic livelihoods. Yet policymakers creating development policies, whether in response to disasters or with an eye toward the long-term, face a core problem: measuring sustainable development variables.

Against the backdrop of an ever more urgent climate crisis, improving efforts to get good data has never been more important. The most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lays bare the scale of this challenge, yet even as scientists warn that time is running out to slow the warming of the planet, persistent disagreement remains about how much wealthy countries should be spending on climate assistance for lower-resourced ones.

These questions of how much to spend on aid and where to spend it raise a key issue with development broadly. In the past, poor forecasting and inefficient aid distribution have hindered the effectiveness of development programs, including on climate. If policymakers and researchers cannot get accurate information about a problem, it’s more difficult to forge effective solutions. But new technology for development analysis, driven by a combination of satellite imagery and machine learning, may hold the keys to progress.

A decade ago, scientists expected the quantum technology revolution to lie in the distant future—say, 30 years out. But recent developments have shortened that timeline dramatically, generating greater confidence than ever that the quantum revolution really is around the corner, although major technical challenges remain to be overcome. Just as U.S. government funding and policy allowed the internet to flourish, the United States now has the opportunity to help shepherd the next revolution in technology.

Today, the field of quantum information science and technology (QIST), stands at the cusp of a series of breakthroughs that could finally bring quantum technology—and the great benefits it will likely bring with it—into the mainstream. But progress in QIST is fragile, and sustaining this progress requires investment and coordination by the U.S. government and a continued policy of openness toward the scientists that will deliver these breakthroughs.

The contours of acceptable online speech, and the appropriate mechanisms to ensure meaningful online communities, are among the most contentious policy debates in America today. Moderating content that is not per se illegal but that likely creates significant harm has proven particularly divisive. Many on the left insist digital platforms haven’t done enough to combat hate speech, misinformation, and other potentially harmful material, while many on the right argue that platforms are doing far too much—to the point where “Big Tech” is censoring legitimate speech and effectively infringing on Americans’ fundamental rights. As Congress weighs new regulation for digital platforms, and as states like Texas and Florida create social media legislation of their own, the importance and urgency of the issue is only set to grow.

Yet unfortunately the debate over free speech online is also being shaped by fundamentally incorrect understandings of the First Amendment. As the law stands, platforms are private entities with their own speech rights; hosting content is not a traditional government role that makes a private actor subject to First Amendment constraints. Nonetheless, many Americans erroneously believe that the content-moderation decisions of digital platforms violate ordinary people’s constitutionally guaranteed speech rights. With policymakers at all levels of government working to address a diverse set of harms associated with platforms, the electorate’s mistaken beliefs about the First Amendment could add to the political and economic challenges of building better online speech governance.

In a new paper I examine the nature of that difficulty in more detail. In a nationally representative survey of Americans, I show that commonly held but inaccurate beliefs about the scope of First Amendment protections are linked to lower support for content moderation. Further, I also show that presenting accurate information on the First Amendment to respondents can backfire, leading to lower support for content moderation. These results highlight the challenge of developing widely supported content moderation regimes.