Stories from Abroad

Ask a chatbot in China about Chinese politics, and it will either clam up or echo the official Communist Party line. New studies show a surprising twist: American artificial-intelligence models are unwittingly doing the same—and researchers say AI companies haven’t done much to fix it.

The regulation and competition within the electronic communications market has changed fundamentally over the last 25 years. Initially, the focus was on opening up previously monopolistic telecommunications markets. The electronic communications markets, which were originally clearly demarcated, have since given way to a highly dynamic and complex ICT ecosystem consisting of diverse market participants, technologies, infrastructures, digital services, platforms, and political objectives.

The European Commission took two decisions finding non-compliance by Google with the Digital Markets Act for self-preferencing its own services on Google Search, and for putting in place restrictions on businesses to direct consumers to alternative, often cheaper, purchase channels on Google Play. In this regard, the Commission issued Google a fine of €460 million and a fine of €430 million, respectively. 

Using the 2014-2021 waves of Spain's ICT-H household panel, we track Internet trust for 59,648 users across 130,013 person-year observations. Employing a correlated random-effects ordered-probit model, we find that improvements in digital skills and first-hand use of transactional services are the strongest predictors of higher reported trust, while traditional socio-economic markers show comparatively weaker associations.

The technolibertarian dream of a borderless internet may soon get its biggest reality check in years.

Using nationally representative Quality of Life Survey microdata for 2020–2022, this paper examines who worked from home in Colombia and how WFH is associated with wages, job satisfaction, and weekly hours. A Digital Divide Index for Colombia's employed population has been developed. The results show that WFH is strongly associated with educational attainment, gender, age, firm size, and economic sector. Controlling for regions and economic sectors reveals a positive association between WFH, wages, and job satisfaction, whereas the relationship with weekly hours worked is negative.

The French government said this year that it would replace Zoom and other American videoconference software with a French-developed alternative. Germany is building a homegrown platform for artificial intelligence. Companies in both countries are teaming up to build A.I. chips to rival those of the United States and China. These are modest steps in Europe’s high-stakes race to catch up to America and China in the global sprint for digital independence.

Three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a “joint plan” by China and Russia to “defeat Elon Musk’s Starlink.” The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous “swarm” loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation.

The European Commission issued two sets of binding specification measures to Google under the Digital Markets Act. The aim of the first specification measures is to ensure that competitors' Artificial Intelligence (AI) services can compete with Google's own AI services, such as Gemini, by having equal access to features on Google's Android devices.  Currently, on Android phones, competitors' AI assistants only have restricted access to key functionalities of the Google Android operating system.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the news of late, and stakeholders around the world weighed in this week. The United Nations (UN) convened an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI to assess how AI is transforming lives globally.