Diplo Blog

The combined quarterly revenue of a handful of Internet companies is staggering. As the recent financial results have shown, the $142 billion figure is a 12-fold increase over the companies’ revenue 10 years ago.
 

DiploFoundation has become a member of the eTrade for All initiative, launched during the 2017 UNCTAD E-commerce Week. The initiative aims to expand the positive impact of e-commerce on development. It provides a hub for actors to find information, offer resources, build partnerships and receive the support they need to strengthen digital trade.

Bitcoin is growing rapidly. As we wrote two years ago, Bitcoin’s future was uncertain. The scalability of the network was at the centre of a dispute among major Bitcoin developers. Several solutions were fighting for primacy. Two years of harsh words and failed compromises finally reached closure last week, in a quite unusual twist.

In 2016, according to a Gallup poll, 73% of Americans cited cyberterrorism as a leading threat to vital US interests in the next 10 years. However, what does it really mean when we deduce that there is a threat of cyberterrorism? Do we know who the terrorists hiding behind the many lines of code are? Do we really know what we are, or should be, afraid of? And whom?

Six months into 2017, the digital weather remains unsettled. Various crises brought occasional storms. Internet growth and innovation triggered a few sunny spells. The digital weather remains similar to the annual forecast for 2017.

Social life is a complex phenomenon, whether we are looking at offline or online interactions. We identify. We form groups. We sense belonging. We dislike. We exclude. Without evident reasons, we feel connected to some and disconnected to others. As inherent functions of social life, social groups have been created and dismantled. They become coherent and diffuse, as if compressed and decompressed in a continuous accordion play.

The importance of middle powers in the realm of global governance has soared post-2008, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. G20 summits, which began convening following the global financial crisis of 2008, have been increasingly overwhelmed since 2010, by those member countries left outside the scope of the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

Diplo’s July WebDebate explored the extent to which sports can be used as a tool for diplomacy and peace. We asked: what forms does sports diplomacy take? Who are the actors? Is it more than just propaganda by other means? And, to what extent can it contribute to peace?

The UN Group of Governmental Experts (UN GGE) being unable to reach consensus on its final report, new cyber-norms proposed by the private sector, and governments renewing calls for more regulation of the Internet were among the main digital policy developments in the month of June.

Dr Roxana Radu, Programme Manager at the Geneva Internet Platform (GIP), has been awarded the Swiss Network for International Studies Award 2017 (SNIS) for her PhD thesis, Global Rules for Emerging Issue Domains: Negotiating the Governance of the Internet, defended at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in