Based on key indicators of innovation and advanced-industry performance, China has surpassed the United States in total innovation output and is getting close on a proportional basis. To regain its leadership, the United States must respond more strategically and forcefully.

The common refrain that big business wields disproportionate political power is overblown. Lobbying data indicates that large firms spend relatively less on lobbying than do smaller firms.

Peer-reviewed research finds that pharmaceutical innovation provides direct and indirect benefits for health-care use and disability.

Policymakers should empower metaverse platforms to develop innovative tools and solutions to address safety issues and ensure AR/VR products and services don’t harm users. Overly prescriptive regulation risks stifling the progress of those innovations.

Critics argue U.S. broadband speeds are slow and the country’s broadband system overall is poor, but U.S. speeds actually are fast and outpace everyday demands. Focusing too much attention on speed simply diverts resources that otherwise could be used to close the digital divide.

Police tech could transform the way law enforcement operates, reducing crime and saving lives. Policymakers should focus on advancing adoption while enacting regulations to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of police tech.

Defending Digital Series, No. 13: Although many of today’s accusations against Big Tech are unfair, the technology industry should do more to protect itself. Pushing back against its critics, better aligning itself with America’s national interests, becoming more politically neutral, and effectively addressing long-term societal challenges would surely help.

As Yogi Berra once said, making predictions is hard, especially about the future. So, looking ahead to the New Year, ITIF can offer predictions with only 90 percent confidence. The other half is prescriptive.

Restrictive data policies coming into effect in Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Vietnam will measurably increase import costs and reduce trade volumes, undermining the broader economic role of data. Policymakers should change course or else be left behind in the race for digital development.

Gift card scams are on the rise. Scammers have relied on predatory tactics, emotional stories, and product tampering to steal nearly $450 million from unsuspecting Americans in the last three years alone, and the trend shows little signs of slowing.

In absolute terms, the United States is among the world’s leaders in deploying fast broadband, and it does so at competitive prices. But there is room for improvement on broadband adoption.

Policymakers should both make permanent many of the COVID-19 era policies that allow medical providers to see patients remotely and enact provisions allowing for the practice of telemedicine over state lines. However, policymakers should also take further steps to ensure that telehealth providers offer and abide by the same standard of care as in-person treatment.

Private label products have been important for consumers and the economy since the 19th century because retailers can sell them at lower prices with greater efficiency than brand-name alternatives. Legislation that prevents retailers from putting their own products front and center—either online or on store shelves—would jeopardize those benefits.

Section 337 of the 1930 Tariff Act allows the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) to bar imports when domestic industries suffer harm due to unfair competition. Congress should expand the law to better address the unfair trade practices China uses to capture market share in advanced industries at America’s expense.

The tax law allowing firms to fully expense their research and development (R&D) costs expired at the end of 2021, and full expensing of equipment costs will begin phasing out in 2023. This decreases firms’ incentive to invest in these key drivers of economic growth and competitiveness. Congress should restore and make permanent full expensing for these investments.

Innovation ecosystems are increasingly complex and diverse, but there are common markers of core strength. In this report, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the German Economic Institute, the Institute for Competitiveness, and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute benchmark 96 states and regions across Germany, Italy, the United States, and Canada.

European and U.S. policymakers have proposed imposing monitoring obligations on Internet intermediaries to improve online safety. Despite their best efforts, these proposals risk undermining users’ privacy by eliminating the use of end-to-end encryption. Therefore, policymakers should not pursue them.

Policymakers in some nations want edge companies such as Netflix to pay a larger share of broadband infrastructure costs. These “sending-party-pays” policies would harm Internet users, disproportionately tax U.S. tech companies, and fail to deliver infrastructure improvements.

The Biden administration has made improving customer experience (CX) a top priority for federal agencies. That hinges on providing robust digital services. But agencies are behind in digital adoption, and they don’t do enough to measure CX via digital platforms, much less to improve.

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) will play the most significant role in meeting President Biden’s goal of a zero-carbon aviation sector by 2050, but significant progress must be made to scale up production and bring down costs.

Policymakers could improve content moderation on social media by building international consensus on content moderation guidelines, providing more resources to address state-sponsored disinformation, and increasing transparency in content moderation decisions.

The process of “creative destruction,” whereby new technologies and business models displace old ones, is key to growth and innovation. The evolution of the retail industry illustrates why it is beneficial and sheds light on the pitfalls of current legislative and regulatory efforts to limit it.

Many attempts to increase the flexibility of wireless spectrum rights meet objections that the method of reallocation will result in a windfall for corporate license holders. Far from being objectionable, however, allowing windfalls in spectrum reallocation creates virtuous incentives.

The federal hydrogen hubs program will be perceived as a bellwether for U.S. clean energy innovation policy writ large. As such, its process for selecting winning proposals must not only be effective, but also fair, transparent, and timely.

The information technology (IT) sector makes an outsized contribution to the U.S. economy as a leading exporter that creates high-paying jobs, including for non-college-educated workers, while producing highly innovative products and services that drive broad-based growth, counteract inflation, and improve people’s quality of life.

Europe professes to want greater transatlantic digital cooperation, yet it is systemically excluding U.S. firms from participating in its technical standards-setting processes. A real transatlantic digital alliance requires real EU-U.S. cooperation on technical standards.

Continued leadership in high-performance computing (HPC) as it enters the exascale era remains a key pillar of U.S. industrial competitiveness, economic power, and national security readiness. Policymakers need to sustain investments in HPC applications, infrastructure, and skills to keep America at the leading edge.

As businesses compete for customers in the digital economy, some use deceptive tactics to manipulate consumer reviews about their goods or services, or those of their competitors, including by posting fake reviews. These fake reviews can damage honest companies’ reputation and deceive consumers into purchasing goods or services of substandard quality.

Spectrum policy takes engineering and technical realities as inputs to a decision-making process that is driven by normative principles. While many competing principles have had their heyday, these five are enduring guides to making spectrum work in the public interest.

The Online Safety Bill’s loose definition of what constitutes “legal but harmful” content, overbroad scope, and general legislative overreach encroach on the civil liberties of all users—not just those in the United Kingdom.

The Digital Markets Act presents three fundamental challenges as it nears adoption: First, it will increase regulatory fragmentation. Second, its disproportionate blanket obligations and prohibitions will be economically detrimental and legally controversial. Third, it will be difficult to implement, as some of its provisions clash with other European regulations.

Data privacy regulations impose significant costs on businesses and the economy. Effective, targeted federal legislation would address actual privacy harms while reducing costs that hinder productivity and innovation.

The 117th Congress was the most AI-focused congressional session in history with 130 AI bills proposed, so it is a good moment to take stock of U.S. AI policy accomplishments to date and identify areas where there is room for continued progress.

Stringent drug price controls have significantly hampered the competitive and innovative capacity of Japan’s biopharmaceutical industry in recent decades, serving as a warning for U.S. policymakers considering introducing Medicare Part D drug price controls in 2022.

Comparisons between U.S. and European broadband prices abound, but their respective markets are built on such entirely different cost structures as to make any comparison between the two meaningless without accounting for the differences in necessary expenditures.

Compared to major competitors, U.S. output in key advanced industries is weak and declining. Congress and the administration should launch an economic “moon shot” initiative committing to increase the concentration of these industries in the U.S. economy by at least 20 percentage points relative to the global average within a decade.