Internet

Join ITIF for a discussion on recently introduced chatbot safety bills up for debate in Congress, including the GUARD Act and CHATBOT Act, and what policymakers, parents, and platforms could do to protect children without bans.

Please join ITIF's Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness for a virtual panel examining how Canada should think about sovereignty in cloud and compute, what current proposals get right and wrong, and what a more disciplined approach to digital dependence would look like.

The UK should resist the urge to regulate in haste. Protecting children online is essential, but protection should mean smarter design, stronger safety tools, and greater parental control, not blanket bans that remove technology from young people and choice from families.

Critics say the SECURE Data Act is a unified Republican effort. Yet its core provisions mirror privacy protections passed by Democratic and Republican majorities in 21 states. So, while it would preempt state laws, it also draws heavily from those laws, reflecting a bipartisan, multistate consensus on how to protect consumers while enabling innovation.

A New Mexico ruling against Meta highlights how the growing patchwork of state digital regulations could fragment the U.S. internet by forcing companies to restrict or withdraw online services in certain states, underscoring the need for Congress to establish a unified federal digital policy framework.

Organized retail crime is increasingly exploiting e-commerce platforms, and while companies like Amazon and eBay are investing in detection and transparency, governments must strengthen law enforcement and coordination to effectively combat these organized criminal networks.

Lawmakers risk misregulating grocery prices by targeting dynamic and algorithmic pricing tools, and should instead focus on enforcing existing laws against clearly defined deceptive practices.

Canada’s cloud debate is asking the wrong question—control, not domestic ownership or server location, is what determines security and resilience in practice.

To the extent intervention is deemed necessary, ITIF respectfully urges the Competition and Markets Authority to avoid following the EU DMA’s path of heavy-handed regulation when it comes to potential steering measures in the app store space and instead look to other jurisdictions, like Japan, that have taken a more tailored and flexible approach.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission should shift more enforcement focus toward Chinese e-commerce platforms—like Temu and SHEIN—because, despite widespread safety violations linked to Chinese-made goods, these high-scale marketplaces face disproportionately little scrutiny despite posing significant risks to U.S. consumers.