Alan McQuinn

EU policymakers created the GDPR to protect an individual’s right to privacy—a right that they see worth protecting at any cost. However, its creators did nothing to prevent these costs from being levied on non-Europeans. Policymakers around the world should step in to ensure that if Europe wants privacy, it must pay its own bill.

As ITIF’s Alan McQuinn and Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Center write for the Daily Caller, the next generation of supersonic passenger jets is projected to be cleaner, cheaper, and more affordable—helping increase accessibility to every corner of Spaceship Earth.

As Alan McQuinn writes for InsideSources, data is not like cash, and enacting laws and regulations based on this misconception would both harm America’s digital economy and consumers.

U.S. policymakers should continue down this path to create more permissive and updated rules for SSTs. Only by allowing the technology to achieve lift-off will policymakers be able to spur investment in supersonic technology and improve its efficiency and effectiveness writes David M. Hart in Innovation Files.

Policies designed to increase consumer trust in technology would likely weaken the U.S. digital ecosystem and lower consumer welfare, Alan McQuinn and Daniel Castro write for the Washington Examiner.

Data protection regulations are often falsely described as means to increase consumer trust, and therefore technology adoption and use. Policymakers should be wary of those making this claim without evidence.

Boosting transatlantic cooperation on ICT policy would allow Canada, the EU, and the United States to address global ICT challenges and support their domestic economies by raising productivity.

Organizations are scrambling to comply with the GDPR, sending out alerts to shield themselves from liability even though in many cases it’s not necessary. This is emblematic of a core problem: It is a confusing and impractical set of rules to comply with, and it offers consumers little to no benefit.

Opponents of facial recognition technology are not arguing for “the right protections” to be put into place. Nor are they trying to have a conversation about what rules or norms should govern its use. Instead, they are demonizing it and trying to stop a company from selling it.

The current music licensing system is labyrinthine, often failing to pay artists and publishers fair rates for all their works while also limiting how the digital media platforms that license this music can innovate. Congress is trying to fix that.

Putting a nonprofit in charge of a social media platform like Facebook would decrease the security of consumers’ personal data, damage the digital ecosystem, and ultimately lead to less innovation in online services, leaving consumers worse off.

In an op-ed for Law360, ITIF’s Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn outline four ways incoming Chairman Joseph Simons can balance the FTC’s consumer protection duties while allowing innovation to proceed apace.