Reports & Briefings

For brief overviews of how key technologies work and why they matter, see ITIF’s “Technology Explainer Series.”

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February 24, 2020
How Voluntary Agreements Among Key Stakeholders Help Combat Digital Piracy
Working together, firms from different parts of the digital economy can disrupt the supply side of the digital piracy equation to make it harder and costlier for illicit operators to function.
February 14, 2020
Trump Budget Would Slam the Brakes on Energy Innovation
Congress has soundly rejected the administration’s previous budget proposals in this area, instead putting forward a positive vision for U.S. innovation that invests in a future of clean, reliable, low-cost energy. Lawmakers should do so again in fiscal year 2021.
February 3, 2020
Delinkage Debunked: Why Replacing Patents With Prizes for Drug Development Won’t Work
Separating the cost of biopharmaceutical research and development from the final market price of medicines would misalign incentives, raise bureaucratic costs, and limit innovation.
January 27, 2020
The Critics Were Wrong: NIST Data Shows the Best Facial Recognition Algorithms Are Neither Racist Nor Sexist
A close look at data from a new NIST report reveals that the best facial recognition algorithms in the world are highly accurate and have vanishingly small differences in their rates of false-positive or false-negative readings across demographic groups.
January 27, 2020
Surveying the Damage: Why We Must Accurately Measure Cross-Border Data Flows and Digital Trade Barriers
Countries that value an open, competitive digital economy should use surveys to improve quantitative analysis of cross-border data flows, because policymakers can’t effectively manage and address barriers to digital trade unless they can measure it.
January 21, 2020
Accelerating Energy Innovation in the 116th Congress: 10 Priorities for 2020
As the House and Senate consider comprehensive energy legislation, these 10 priorities have already won the support of large bipartisan majorities at the committee level in at least one chamber. They should form the nucleus of a bipartisan energy package that gets signed into law this year.
January 13, 2020
What the EU Should Put in the Digital Services Act
The eCommerce Directive—a critical building block of the EU’s digital economy—is in need of modernization, but updates should continue to remove obstacles to online commerce and provide legal certainty to businesses and citizens.
January 13, 2020
Why and How to Mount a Strong, Trilateral Response to China’s Innovation Mercantilism
The United States, the EU, and Japan must band together in stronger trilateral partnership to pressure China into rolling back the mercantilist trade practices it uses to grow advanced, innovation-driven industries.
January 6, 2020
Innovation Drag: China’s Economic Impact on Developed Nations
An examination of the scholarly literature shows that China’s mercantilist-powered economic rise and trade expansion have slowed the progress of innovation in the global economy—particularly in North America and Europe.
December 16, 2019
The Case for a Mostly Open Internet
Policymakers should seek to maximize the benefits of Internet openness while maintaining carefully designed guardrails that reduce the Internet’s most clearly harmful uses.

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