Data Innovation

ITIF’s spring seminar course explores core emerging technologies and issues that are reshaping our world and, in the process, creating public policy challenges and opportunities. The course is open to congressional and federal staff only.

In a letter to the Financial Times, Daniel Castro argues that Europe’s push for “digital sovereignty,” exemplified by France replacing Zoom and Teams with a domestic platform, risks fragmenting the transatlantic digital ecosystem and weakening security and efficiency, and that true resilience comes from interoperable systems, shared rules, and cooperation among allied countries.

Matthew Kilcoyne in World Commerce Review argues that Europe’s pursuit of digital sovereignty risks fragmenting the digital economy and weakening innovation, and instead calls for coordinated, interoperable infrastructure, open data flows, and shared standards to preserve scale, efficiency, and economic growth.

The EU’s “payment sovereignty” push is a misdiagnosed, protectionist project that would benefit incumbent banks rather than consumers. Europe should instead pursue regulatory reform and use existing tools like interchange caps and PSD2 to promote competition and lower costs.

Mandatory adoption of EU-style digital rules amounts to regulatory imperialism for many countries in the Global South. It limits technology adoption, raises compliance costs, and undermines the ability of local firms to compete with Western ones.

New York’s AI safety law claims alignment with California, but its small deviations create duplicative state requirements that fragment U.S. AI policy and increase compliance costs without improving safety.

The European Commission’s proposed tweaks to the ePrivacy Directive offer only minor relief from intrusive cookie prompts, but to truly support innovation, free digital services, and Europe’s competitiveness, policymakers must fundamentally overhaul the outdated consent model.

The DMA’s forced interoperability undermines platform differentiation, weakens security and reliability, and ultimately leaves European consumers with degraded versions of global technologies.

The EU’s digital rulebook, often praised as global leadership, instead forces many non-EU countries into costly regulatory alignment that stifles local innovation and entrenches global digital inequality, underscoring the need for more flexible, locally tailored frameworks.

In an op-ed for The Dispatch, Daniel Castro argues that banning superintelligent AI is misguided because it’s based on speculation, would undermine U.S. innovation and security, and should be replaced with strong oversight—not restrictions on advancing knowledge.