Regions

The collapse of a UK espionage case against alleged Chinese spies highlights Britain’s refusal to call China a security threat, exposing a dangerous weakness driven by economic dependence.

The UK Online Safety Act aims to protect children online but its vague rules and strict enforcement have led to over-censorship, threatening legitimate communities, and Parliament should clarify content definitions, allow remediation periods, and require judicial review to fix these issues.

The idea that nations can invoke “AI sovereignty” to draw on U.S. technology when convenient, while walling off their markets, is not a bargain U.S. policymakers should entertain.

Rather than following the UK’s lead on children’s online safety, U.S. policymakers should learn from their mistakes and chart a better path that skillfully preserves user privacy, limits collateral damage, and removes the incentives for online services to over-remove lawful content.

ITIF does not agree with the Competition and Markets Authority's provisional findings that Apple's mobile platform has Strategic Market Status and that there are high barriers to entry and expansion.

Canada’s first major test of its reformed competition law centers on Amazon’s pricing rules, but the Competition Bureau’s case risks punishing a policy that lowers prices for consumers and mistaking competition on the merits for anticompetitive conduct.

Real sovereignty in digital systems isn’t about where servers sit. Canada should build sovereignty into contracts and cryptography, embedding control and security through procurement rules, Canadian-cleared personnel, and encryption safeguards.

Canada should approach exploratory talks regarding a Canada–EU digital trade agreement with caution. Greater alignment with the EU may appear to provide a hedge against U.S. influence, but in practice it risks importing a framework that impedes the potential for Canada’s digital economy and industries while raising compliance costs.

The Bureau should not treat algorithmic pricing as a risk category in itself. The relevant concern is not whether pricing is algorithmic, dynamic, or AI-enabled, but whether it is used to harm competition or consumers. Addressing that will require focusing on market context and firm conduct rather than the type of tool used.

Canada has zero entries among the world’s top 50 science and tech clusters. Waterloo is the best candidate for elevation. To make that happen, the federal and Ontario governments should create an incentive: Tech start-ups based in Waterloo, as well as firms outside Canada that relocate meaningful R&D and innovation production to the region, will pay no tax for a decade.

A new irrigation technology incorporating AI sensors reduces water use by 30 percent and methane emissions by 47 percent compared to continuous irrigation methods.

Proposed changes to Kenya’s competition regime will hinder, not help its digital economy. Rather than impose substantial changes based on the false premise that digital markets require special treatment, Kenya should use existing enforcement tools to police its growing digital markets.

ITIF’s submission focuses on the ITC’s interest in recent developments in the digital economy for key SSA markets, including national and regional regulatory and policy measures and market conditions that affect digital trade.

When attempting to evaluate the effect that a policy intervention can have on development or innovation, researchers and policymakers routinely look to short-term impacts, both out of urgency and because of the difficulty in maintaining contact with participants over several years.

Over the last decade, mobile money services have brought banking to populations that have lacked formal financial services by allowing users to manage money on their mobile phones. First launched in Kenya in 2007, 96 percent of Kenyan households now use mobile money and can withdraw funds in physical currency from 110,000 agents across the country.

As the KFTC enters its fifth decade, it is clear its mission must evolve—from control to credibility, and from compliance to competitiveness.

Democratic allies should co-invest, co-develop, and co-regulate emerging technologies instead of fragmenting digital markets. True leadership will come from joint strategies on export controls, standards, R&D, and talent—not sovereignty slogans.

If enacted, the draft law may inadvertently harm Vietnamese consumers, stifle digital innovation, and complicate bilateral trade relations between the United States and Vietnam to the detriment of both nations.

Korea has entered the global top four economies in innovation, powered by world-class research intensity and corporate R&D. Amid a persistent input–output gap and weak startup M&A activity, the challenge now is scale: converting knowledge into globally competitive firms.

Rather than blanket social media bans, policymakers should adopt privacy-preserving tools that empower parents and teens to manage online safety directly.

We see plenty of “useful idiots” today. They no longer carry the Bolsheviks’ water, but rather parrot the CCP line as they disparage the West and praise China.

Certain Chinese companies obscure their ownership and strategic intent in the U.S. economy, gaining access to markets, talent, intellectual property, and subsidies. These practices advance China’s industrial and military goals and necessitate stronger oversight measures.

China’s campaign of economic espionage against the United States spans cyber intrusions, insider theft, and technology transfer disguised as collaboration. Washington must recognize that Beijing is operating an elaborate espionage ecosystem and take strategic measures to disrupt it.

The collapse of a UK espionage case against alleged Chinese spies highlights Britain’s refusal to call China a security threat, exposing a dangerous weakness driven by economic dependence.

The European Commission’s 2025 Strategic Foresight Report misframes the U.S. as a rival on par with China, risking transatlantic unity and protectionist policies that weaken Europe while leaving China free to dominate critical technologies.

Despite its promise to make Europe’s digital economy fairer and more open, the Digital Markets Act has instead made life online slower, costlier, and more complicated for the very consumers it was meant to protect.

The EU’s Cyber Crisis Management Blueprint establishes a coordinated framework for member states to prevent, respond to, and recover from large-scale cyber incidents, strengthening resilience, interoperability, and operational readiness while providing a model for other regional institutions.

The implementation of the Digital Services Act’s transparency obligations fails to provide meaningful insight into online platforms’ content moderation decisions, the extraterritorial effects of the act, and its effects on online speech.

The UK’s refusal to formally designate China as a national security threat has undermined its ability to prosecute espionage, leaving its technology and innovation sectors vulnerable to Chinese infiltration and economic coercion.

The EU’s overbroad interoperability mandates target U.S. tech firms, delay new features for European users, and open the door for China to challenge Western tech leadership.

The mounting economic costs of burdensome regulations that exact far more costs than benefits on societies—and which in many countries have led to unchecked regulatory accumulation—and the adverse impact on innovation, productivity, and long-term growth they cause.

Policymakers must justify why they should be allowed to tax the major digital companies differently from the leading firms in other industries. This challenge explains why so much of the DST debate has centered around obscure and abstract notions of a company’s “physical presence” and whether the company’s users “create value.”

When local data storage regulations are open or with pre-authorized safeguards, global exports are expected to rise by 3.6 percent and global gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to increase by 1.77 percent. When regulations are more stringent against different geopolitical blocs, global exports are expected to decline by 1.76 percent while GDP is expected to fall by 0.94 percent. Regulations that prohibit the flow of data also have a sizable impact with exports declining by 8.45 percent and GDP declining by 4.53 percent.

By prioritising the digitisation and availability of data that reflects this diversity, countries and communities stand a better chance of shaping AI in their own image, rather than submitting to someone else’s.

The Trump administration’s "Liberation Day" tariffs foolishly alienate allies instead of strategically targeting China, inadvertently weakening U.S. competitiveness and handing a win to Beijing.

Brazil’s Digital Markets Bill promises to tame tech giants, but in reality, it threatens to import Europe’s flawed regulatory experiment—punishing innovation more than protecting consumers

This report ranks more than 200 regions across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States on 13 commonly available indicators of innovation competitiveness, and offers policymakers a guide to bolstering regional and national innovation capacity.

A combination of privacy-protective age verification systems utilizing digital forms of identification and AI, parental controls that are readily available and easy to use, and greater transparency from digital platforms would increase children’s safety and privacy, encourage innovation in improved safety and privacy controls, and better inform policymakers and parents on next steps to protect children.

Mexico's newly elected president, Claudia Sheinbaum, can reverse President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's anti-innovation policies toward genetically modified maize, and improve the lives of small farmers across Mexico.

The current scope of University-Industry (U-I) collaboration in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) opens opportunities for research to progress in innovative directions.