The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means, by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.

Article 1: The Purposes of the United Nations are:

1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.

Article 2: The Organization and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article 1, shall act in accordance with the following Principles:

1. The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.

• Rule 1: The principle of State sovereignty applies in cyberspace.

• Rule 2: A State enjoys sovereign authority with regard to the cyber infrastructure, persons, and cyber activities located within its territory, subject to its international legal obligations.

• Rule 3: A State is free to conduct cyber activities in its international relations, subject to any contrary rule of international law binding on it.

• Rule 4: A State must not conduct cyber operations that violate the sovereignty of another State.

10.Sovereignty is a fundamental element of international law and international relations. It is axiomatic that the principle of sovereignty applies in cyberspace, just as it does elsewhere. It animates a number of obligations for all States.

It is undisputed that the principle of State sovereignty applies in cyberspace. While cyberspace as a whole cannot be subject to appropriation by any State, each State has jurisdiction over the cyber infrastructure and the persons engaged in cyber activities within its territory.

The legal principle of State sovereignty ⁷ applies to States’ activities with regard to cyberspace. ⁸ State sovereignty implies, inter alia, that a State retains a right of regulation, enforcement and adjudication (jurisdiction) with regard to both persons engaging in cyber activities and cyber infrastructure on its territory.

I want to spend the bulk of my remaining time on another global problem: the rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant IT platform companies. These companies have often played an innovative and liberating role. But as Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation, and they have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware.

They claim they are merely distributing information. But the fact that they are near- monopoly distributors make them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access.

The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace, and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them. In the US, the regulators are not strong enough to stand up against their political influence. The European Union is better situated because it doesn’t have any platform giants of its own.

Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.

American data policy should be decided by the American people through their representatives, right here in Congress, not by trade tribunals, not by trade negotiators, and certainly not by Big Tech.

And while the web has created opportunity, given marginalized groups a voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.

We will also look at the role social media played and what steps we can take, including on the international stage, and in unison with our partners. We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published. They are the publisher. Not just the postman. There cannot be a case of all profit no responsibility.

My name is Frances Haugen. I used to work at Facebook and joined because I think Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in us. But I am here today because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more. The company’s leadership knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer and won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their immense profits before people. Congressional action is needed.

I came forward because I recognized a frightening truth: almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside Facebook. The company’s leadership keeps vital information from the public, the U.S. government, its shareholders, and governments around the world. The documents I have provided prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled us about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, its role in spreading hateful and polarizing messages, and so much more.

I stand before you, a representative of every journalist around the world who is forced to sacrifice so much to hold the line, to stay true to our values and mission: to bring you the truth and hold power to account.

I helped create a startup, Rappler, turning 10 years old in January – our attempt to put together two sides of a coin that shows everything wrong with our world today: an absence of law and democratic vision for the 21st century. That coin represents our information ecosystem, which determines everything else about our world. Journalists, the old gatekeepers, are one side of the coin. The other is technology, with its god-like power that has allowed a virus of lies to infect each of us, pitting us against each other, bringing out our fears, anger and hate, and setting the stage for the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.

Our greatest need today is to transform that hate and violence, the toxic sludge that’s coursing through our information ecosystem, prioritized by American internet companies that make more money by spreading that hate and triggering the worst in us.

These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, blazed against journalists. They are – by design – dividing us and radicalizing us.

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth.

We need information ecosystems that live and die by facts. We do this by shifting social priorities to rebuild journalism for the 21st century while regulating and outlawing the surveillance economics that profit from hate and lies.

Elon Musk is now kingmaker in the United States, and Europe could be next. And if Musk’s brazen intervention in American politics pays off, then Brussels should be prepared for Silicon Valley’s influence to grow more partisan and aggressively political.

Clearly, not all tech billionaires hold the same political opinions or attitudes, yet we’re currently witnessing the wealthiest tech elite publicly falling in line behind the incoming Trump administration.

Furthermore, something all US tech companies have in common is their growing frustration with Brussels and the EU’s leading role as a global tech regulator.

Policy debate around online content moderation is taking on a new urgency. From Elon Musk’s restructuring of X (formerly Twitter) to fit his own political agenda to Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this month that his company would shutter fact-checking and loosen policies on hate speech, these sudden u-turns at the whim of billionaire CEOs expose the troubling power asymmetries facing online users and policymakers when they grapple with the Big Tech firms that govern the flow of information across social media platforms.

Big Tech’s self-legitimizing, economically and politically-motivated changes are alarming. They are happening at a time of great geopolitical instability when domestic and foreign actors are weaponizing Information, exploitative data practices are becoming normalized, and AI tools are outpacing ethical and regulatory safeguards. This moment demands a close look at how major tech companies wield control over the information space, a theme at the center of the report Information Ecosystems and Troubled Democracy by the International Observatory on Information & Democracy, released today.

The growing digitalization of our society has led to a meteoric rise of large technology companies (Big Tech), which have amassed tremendous wealth and influence through their ownership of digital infrastructure and platforms. The recent launch of ChatGPT and the rapid popularization of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) act as a focusing event to further accelerate the concentration of power in the hands of the Big Tech. By using Kingdon’s multiple streams framework, this article investigates how Big Tech utilize their technological monopoly and political influence to reshape the policy landscape and establish themselves as key actors in the policy process. It explores the implications of the rise of Big Tech for policy theory in two ways. First, it develops the Big Tech-centric technology stream, highlighting the differing motivations and activities from the traditional innovation-centric technology stream. Second, it underscores the universality of Big Tech exerting ubiquitous influence within and across streams, to primarily serve their self-interests rather than promote innovation. Our findings emphasize the need for a more critical exploration of policy role of Big Tech to ensure balanced and effective policy outcomes in the age of AI.

The recent Munich Security Conference, subsequent US-announced measures and further developments in US/EU relations have exposed the stark geopolitical reality Europe is now facing. Building strategic autonomy in key sectors is now a recognised urgent imperative across Europe. As part of this common effort, Europe needs to recover the initiative, and become more technologically independent across all layers of its critical digital infrastructure: from logical Infrastructure - applications, platforms, media, AI frameworks and models - to physical Infrastructure - chips, computing, storage and connectivity. Europe’s current multiple dependencies create security and reliability risks, compromise our sovereignty and hurt our growth.

Case Summary

The Federal Trade Commission has sued Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct. The complaint alleges that Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy—including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers—to eliminate threats to its monopoly.

The Internet has become a central arena for public debate, distribution of quality news content and access to culture. At the same time, tech companies and social media platforms have a huge impact on the democratic discourse in Norway.

Services on the Internet make our lives easier and the access to information better. The Internet is an important infrastructure for different expressions and debate, distribution of quality news content from editor-controlled media, as well as access to movies, music, literature, and TV. At the same time, the tech companies behind these services have become dominant players in the field and have gained considerable economic power. The result is that platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok and Apple have significant influence on the democratic debate in Norway, on the way we attain information and how we communicate with each other.

Editor-controlled media can work as an antidote to mis- and disinformation and is necessary for a well-functioning democracy. It is therefore highly problematic when the platforms block, mute or moderate editorial content from editor-controlled media in Norway. These practices can challenge both freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Therefore, the Minister of Culture and Equality have invited representatives of Norwegian editor-controlled media and of the platform companies for two dialogue meetings – in March 2022 and June 2023. The goal of these meetings was to establish a better dialogue, and to explore how the parties can collaborate on regulation that at the same time secures freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Norway.

The motions describe the Dutch government’s dependence on US technology as a “threat to the autonomy and cybersecurity” of the country and ask the government to stop using these services.

The Dutch government has also been asked to come up with a strategy to wean itself off US platforms.

Another motion calls on the government to issue a tender for a national cloud to be built under “full Dutch management” to store confidential communications and data between departments.

It also asks the government to reconsider the use of Amazon’s web services to host the Netherlands’ internet domain and to give European firms preferential treatment in public tenders.

3. Domestic and foreign enterprises providing services on telecommunications networks or the Internet or providing value-added services in cyberspace in Vietnam that collect, exploit, analyze and process personal information or data on relationships of service users and data created by service users in Vietnam shall store these data in Vietnam for a period prescribed by the Government.

Foreign enterprises referred to in this Clause shall establish branches or representative offices in Vietnam.

4. The Government shall detail Clause 3 of this Article.