A three-decade natural experiment suggests America's centralized regulatory review fostered far greater wealth creation than Europe's precautionary principle, raising stark questions about whether importing EU-style AI rules would undermine US innovation and prosperity.
As policymakers search for an IAEA for AI, lessons from ICANN and internet governance loom large, raising questions about multistakeholder legitimacy, mission creep, technical fragmentation and whether AI demands sector-specific regulation rather than grand global architectures.
At NANOG 96, the AI boom dominated discussions as firms race to build gigawatt-scale data centres packed with advanced GPUs, liquid cooling, and lossless networks, raising fears of overinvestment, neglected security priorities, and a looming infrastructure bubble.
In February 1996, a libertarian myth of cyberspace and sweeping US platform immunity collided, hardwiring digital exceptionalism. Three decades on, that original sin still shields tech and AI from accountability, with legal and social consequences.
SpaceX has filed a plan to place more than a million satellites in low Earth orbit, recasting data centres as spaceborne infrastructure while testing regulators, safety, competition and the line between vision and paper ambition.
Starlink is leveraging its growing dominance with data-hungry AI ambitions, regulatory demands, and space infrastructure plans. A merger with xAI could solidify its position as an unregulated gatekeeper of orbital connectivity and intelligence.
A 2026 outlook charts Internet governance between fear and hope, tracking cyber conflict, digital trade and taxation, shrinking rights, and global AI rivalry, while asking whether multistakeholder cooperation can still steer the network toward stability.
As AI shifts from experimentation to real-world deployment, its unseen foundation - undersea cables - emerges as a strategic frontier. Their resilience may shape not only infrastructure policy but the outcome of US-China AI competition.
As AI transforms how users search, the domain name is evolving from a traffic destination into a trust signal - crucial for citation, identity, and authority in an Internet shaped by machine-mediated discovery.
The Internet is evolving far beyond screens and smartphones. A proposed seven-stage framework anticipates a future shaped by autonomous agents, sensory wearables, global connectivity, and quantum networks redefining how humans interact with the digital world.