Technology Policy

I have been working in the field of technology policy—broadly conceived—for over two decades now. I strayed into this topic through an earlier interest in economic development, which I studied as an undergraduate (including some life-changing classes with Amartya Sen). My doctoral research (at Oxford, in Law) was focused on policies and regulations to bridge the digital divide in rural India. Through that work, I got involved in a range of issues related to telecoms policy, content, and Internet governance (especially related to ICANN).
The field has changed pretty dramatically since the turn of the millennium, when I first started thinking about it. Back then, it felt pretty arcane and technical, and tangential to the main currents of life. It was hard to get excited about DNS and TLD (top-level domains, for those who don’t remember) management. But now tech policy is so much broader, and encompasses virtually every aspect of our economic, social, political, and cultural lives. I really believe that so many of our seemingly most intractable problems—political polarization, social and economic exclusion, climate—run through tech policy.
So my work these days encompasses a much more diverse set of areas.
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Areas of Work
  • Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), and its potential for inclusion and innovation, especially in the global south. This strand of research takes place at Princeton, where I’m co-leading a DPI initiative at the Chadha Center for Global India. I also taught a course on DPI at Princeton. (Contact me if you’d like to see the syllabus).
  • Technology and development,
    and especially artificial intelligence in the global south. I’m working on these issues in New America’s Planetary Politics program.
  • Data ethics, including open data, data sharing, and the tradeoffs between privacy and public good. I do much of this work at the GovLab, based within NYU and Northeastern University.
  • Internet governance, including the geopolitics of tech policy, and the growing valence-and, in my views, perils-of digital sovereignty.
  • More broadly, I’m really fascinated by what I think of as the search for a better, next-gen Internet. I’m thinking about missing layers, the role of trust, and the potential (and risks) of digital identity. This is an emerging area of thought, and I’ll be adding more back here soon.
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Recent Writings
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