Act IV — Who is in charge now

Technologies are often called disruptive. But what makes a technology truly disruptive? What has made the PC a disruptive technology? Or artificial intelligence, for that matter? And at what time did it become a disruptive technology? While many would accept that AI was a very disruptive technology starting from 2022 onwards, most of it was available much earlier. Think Generative AI, chatbots, etc. Think of ELIZA, the 60s era psychology chatbot by Joseph Weizenbaum. ...

Podcasting has its own digital infrastructures, for example in hosting them. Let’s look at how podcasting has grown, and what made it take off anyway? Many actors influence each other here, and the state of the art of the technology also has an impact on growth rates. Suppose a hundred people get told by an enthusiastic friend to try podcasting. Of these, ten don’t have any hardware on which they can play the podcasts. So the rest goes online, and tries to find interesting content, but only 50 people can find a directory in which they can even start to look for podcasts that they like. Only 40 people then find content that they sufficiently like. Ten people drop out because they find loading the content too complicated. Of these, another ten find out that the files are too big for the hardware they have (for example in 2005, they just had a simple MP3 player, no iPod or similar). Of the ones left, another five don’t have the patience for the downloads (we are talking dial-up internet access for a lot of people here, still). If you have been keeping tabs: we are down to 25 people who are capable and willing to regularly listen to podcasts. Now suppose each of these tells four friends, on the average. That means we are back to a hundred. ...

The international arena has many actors that can influence digital infrastructures. But opinions differ on what the important ones are, or even what the relevant ones are, as we will see. But the international arena matters, because by the nature of scaling, very few digital infrastructures are influenced by a single national actor only. A word of clarification: I am using the word international here to mean all nations in the world, and their interrelations. In US vernacular, the word international appears to mean all nations, except the US. Instead, the word global is used to mean all nations, including the US. An example implication of this is that a US company would only consider ISO standards to be relevant to them if they also have operations outside the US. ...

Achieving some form of digital autonomy or sovereignty is a wicked problem, too large to handle in one go. Let’s start therefore with the main actors, and what is at stake for them. We can then talk about how digital autonomy allows these actors to collaborate and compete, and therefore impacts the risks they see. Elsewhere, I write about international actors, and this story builds on that. All actors (e.g. governments, companies) perceive IT risk in their own way. Generally though, they include the standard IT risks (confidentiality, integrity, and availability). Beyond that, there is the risk of failing to capture the value of new technology, and failure to exercise governance and control over relevant other actors. ...

Many countries have power struggles between the central government and big corporations. Russia has its oligarchy, China has a socialist market economy. And the second Trump administration has seen major power struggles with big tech companies. Most governments are critically dependent on technology service firms for their regular IT, and these companies may not fully fall under national authority, especially when they are multinationals. Governments cooperate in larger entities, as mentioned before, think EU, NATO, UN. But some governments create extraterritorial jurisdiction or power, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Europe’s favorite tool for soft power is trade agreements that include regulations. The US has a strong history of selectively engaging with international agreements, and overriding non-US regulators. ...