For much of the media and information industry, 2020 has replaced the 2008 recession as the new standard for hard times.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt the U.S and world economies a series of often unprecedented shocks—the “Great Lockdown” as economists refer to it, basically closed a wide-ranging sectors of the economy including service, travel, tourism and entertainment and many more, resulting in unemployment rates in the U.S. of more than 20 percent as of June 2020 and drastic revisions of worldwide economic growth for 2020 and 2021.

The July 7-8, 2017 G20 Leaders’ Declaration includes good language on harnessing digitalization.  SIIA hopes that the ideas in this and other sections of the Declaration will contribute to “Shaping an interconnected world.”   Supporting the free flow of information while respecting applicable legal frameworks for privacy, data protection, and intellectual property rights is the correct approach.  The leaders said that the G20 Roadmap for Digitalisation, which can be found here (see Annex paper 1), will guide future work.  The roadmap contains 11 policy areas where the G20 would like to see action. The G20 wants to improve world-wide access to digital technologies, which means more people need to have access to the Internet.  So, the leaders encourage G20 countries to develop digital strategies that support the ITU’s Global Connect 2020 Agenda goals.  The optimal way to do so is for countries to have a regulatory environme ...

Last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report entitled, Preventing Deglobalization: An Economic and Security Argument for Free Trade and Investment in ICT.  Given the Brexit vote earlier this year, the G-20 Summit earlier this week, and both major U.S. Presidential candidates’ vocal disapproval of trade deals, this report comes at an excellent time to counteract the public’s declining faith in globalization.   Concerns stemming from the results of a globalized ICT economy are not unjustified.  Some countries have adopted protectionist policies in an attempt to foster their own competitive economies in the global marketplace, and others have done it with national security in mind to ensure that globalized products do not contain malware inserted by a foreign country or company to conduct cyber theft or espionage.  These are both fair reasons for wanting to adjust policy to remedy these concerns.  However, as the Chamber’s report ...

On Friday, June 17th, SIIA hosted a panel that was co-sponsored by the Congressional High Tech Caucus and the Congressional Internet of Things Caucus on assessing the benefits, challenges, and policy implications of the Internet of Things. SIIA has been active on the topic of IoT in recent months both filing comments to NTIA and releasing a white paper on the subject.  David LeDuc, SIIA’s Senior Director for Public Policy gave opening remarks where he said SIIA defines the “Internet of Things” as ubiquitous connectivity where people are not only interacting with their devices, but devices are also interacting with each other. He also touched on the importance of regulatory humility cautioning against an overarching policy framework for IoT to accommodate IoT’s complex ecosystem. The panel consisted of representatives from GE Digital, Qualcomm Inc., and the Center for Data Innovation.  Each panelist touched on both public and private sector oppor ...

In his latest column, The New Yorker’s Financial Page writer, James Surowiecki makes the Case for Free Money. Why, he asks, don’t we have universal basic income?  It may be, he thinks, “an idea whose time has come.” He notes that the work disincentive under a universal basic income is mild – in Canada’s Manitoba experiment in the 1970s working hours for men dropped only 1%.  Other measures of well-being improved markedly. Teenagers stayed in school and hospitalization rates declined. So what’s not to like?