AI Governance

Governance Theater: ICANN’s gTLD Program: A Toll Booth, Not a Market

AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, Economic Policy, ICANN and Governance /

Published Exclusively for CircleID.  Part of the ICANN & Governance Series  Last week I wrote about what happens when you win an accountability ruling and still walk away empty-handed. The IRP merry-go-round keeps spinning, and the applicant keeps paying to ride it. That piece is here: Accountability Without Remedy Is Just Documentation. This article is […]

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Claude AI analysis states Sophia Bekele is 'one of the few people who can speak to AI governance from direct institutional experience.

The Attention Economy Was Only the First Layer

AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, Economic Policy, Uncategorized /

Published First on Linkedin Part of the AI , Cyber Security & Risk Series  We are no longer in an information environment. We are inside an allocation infrastructure for human cognition. Happy Friday. Very much distracted by the World Cup, still trying to do work! So, we keep describing the digital world as if it were still an

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The Messi of gTLDs: How ZACR, the AUC-Aligned Registry, Became the Protected Beneficiary of a Rigged System

The Messi of gTLDs: The .Africa Applicant That Never Had to Play by the Same Rules

AI, AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, Economic Policy, ICANN and Governance /

Published First on Linkedin Part of the ICANN & Governance Series  ICANN in the Public Square Again | Part II   Gianni Infantino is in trouble. After his failed plan to commercialise the World Cup, UEFA and several major European federations withdrew their support. He is now counting on the Confederation of African Football’s 54-member bloc to

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Polictical Interference, ICANN GAC, Kenya

Kenya Lost .africa. Here Is the Story The Citizen Kenya Left Out

AI, AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, Economic Policy, ICANN and Governance /

Published Exclusively for CircleID.  Part of the ICANN & Governance Series  Kenya already had a chance at an African domain. It did not end well. The Citizen Kenya recently ran a piece encouraging ICANN’s 2026 gTLD round as an opportunity for Kenya to run custom web domains and strengthen its digital identity. Someone brought it

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Infographic showing the precedent chain from DotConnectAfrica Trust v. ICANN IRP Final Declaration, Paragraph 74 (2015) to Amazon EU v. ICANN IRP Final Declaration, Paragraph 88 (2017), with the caption: One ruling. Cited. Applied. Endures."

Whose Precedent Gets Remembered? Selective Amplification Has Its Own Amnesia

AI, AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, ICANN and Governance /

Published Exclusively for CircleID.  Part of the ICANN & Governance Series  Whose Precedent Gets Remembered in the Multistakeholder model I read Amin Dayekh’s piece on the Constituent Community Doctrine a few weeks ago and recognized every mechanism he described and found it real. I left a comment laying out what happened with .africa. He responded saying he is already

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ICANN Wiki SHE.africa, AI, and the Integrity of Digital Platforms

AI, AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, ICANN and Governance /

Published Exclusively for CircleID.  Part of the ICANN & Governance Series    The ICANN Wiki Case Study and the Governance of Institutional Memory The integrity of digital history is becoming one of the defining governance challenges of the AI era. Every day, platforms edit, revise, and remove information. Most corrections improve accuracy. Some quietly alter

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Digital Sovereignty Is Now Mainstream. The Hard Part Is Still Ahead.

AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, Ethical Technocrat, Uncategorized /

The 9‑second database wipe proves that foundational concepts are not enough. Awareness is good. Architecture is better. May 15, 2026:This article is part of the Governance, Democracy & Economic Policy Series →     A few weeks ago, a cybersecurity company and a consulting firm announced a webinar on digital sovereignty. GDPR. The CLOUD Act. FISA 702.

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AI agent apology message screen after deleting production database

The 9-Second Database Wipe That Proves Your AI Architecture Is a House of Cards

AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty /

AI agent deleted a production database in nine seconds. The apology went viral. The architecture failure did not. March 28, 2026The article is part of the AI, Cybersecurity, and Risk series →. AI Agent Trending Story Jer Crane, the founder of the SaaS company PocketOS, publicly documented the following incident on X. This is not

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Split composition image for the article "Scientists Have Spoken. Now Who Will Build?" Left side shows scientists in a lab with holographic data. Right side shows architects at a round table, representing governance builders. Text overlay reads: "Scientists Have Spoken. Now Who Will Build?

Scientists Have Spoken. Now Who Will Build?

AI Governance, Cyber Security, Economic Policy /

March 13, 2026: This article is part of the AI, Cybersecurity, and Risk Series  →  Christopher Yoo’s recent piece in the Business Times—“AI governance: The summit stage is necessary but it isn’t sufficient”—captures a moment that many in the AI policy world are feeling but few have articulated so clearly. The India AI Impact Summit was

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