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.

The GRID Act misdiagnoses the problem of rising electricity costs by treating data centers as inherently extractive and imposing punitive requirements, rather than addressing flawed market design. A better approach is a flexibility-first model that rewards adjustable AI demand, allowing data centers to support grid stability while protecting households from price spikes.

The India AI Impact Summit will test whether the United States can position itself as a credible AI partner to emerging economies by advancing collaboration with India on adoption, compute equity, and governance to deliver secure, scalable, and impactful AI deployment.

European calls for “payment sovereignty” misdiagnose the problem: Visa and Mastercard lead through competition, not coercion, and a state-backed alternative would entrench protectionism instead of enabling regulatory reforms that would let European firms scale and compete globally.

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.