The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

Who’s Regulating Police Technology? It’s Not the Courts.

The image is a very detailed, black-and-white sketch-like illustration featuring a complex scene of interconnected figures and technology. The artwork portrays various individuals in different environments to represent the relationship between technology and humans. 

In the foreground, multiple people are surrounded by computer screens filled with data visualizations, charts, and technical information. A woman seated in an armchair appears deep in thought, surrounded by data-filled monitors. Beside her, a man leans over, using a tablet to assist with their inspection of a plant or tree. In the centre, a figure holds a large frame or screen displaying anatomical illustrations, representing the use of AI to analyse medical imagery. To the left, another person is intently observing a computer screen, while a second figure nearby is deeply immersed in analysing data. A woman dominates the right side of the composition, gazing upwards as if in contemplation or envisioning something beyond the immediate scene. The background features more people, including a family holding hands, and other abstract representations of data.

AI is Everywhere by Ariyana Ahmad & The Bigger Picture / 

Why We Need a 'Truth Campaign' for the AI Era

Protesters against the Trump administration gather in front of the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2025. (The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images )

A Judicial Wake-Up Call on Government by AI

A sign opposed to data centers is held during a protest against AI data centers in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on Saturday, June 27, 2026. (Ethan Cairns/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

No Data Centers in Anyone's Backyard

World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+20 High-Level Event 2025 by “WSIS” by UN Geneva, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+20 High-Level Event 2025 by “

As the UN Launches its Global Dialogue on AI Governance, WSIS Offers Critical Lessons

America 250 rally on the National Mall for the Great American State Fair. Wednesday June 24, 2026. (Official White House photo by Patrick B. Ruddy)

America 250 rally on the National Mall for the Great American State Fair. Wednesday June 24, 2026. (Official White House 

June 2026 US Tech Policy Roundup

An electoral official sits at a polling station before polls opened for the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Countering Authoritarian Disinformation Requires More than Platform Governance

Members of the UN Scientific Panel on AI. Source

Members of the UN Scientific Panel on AI. 

AI Will Affect Everyone's Future. Its Governance Can't Belong to a Few.

The Supreme Court is seen Tuesday, June 30, 2026, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Supreme Court Decimates Key Remedies for Tech Complicity in Human Rights Abuse

Social media logos are displayed on a smartphone alongside an under-16 age-restriction symbol in this photo illustration, as governments around the world introduce or consider bans and stricter age-verification rules to limit minors' access to social media platforms. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via AP)


Can Regulators Actually Deliver a Presumptive Teen Social Media Ban?

The UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance Should Tackle the AI Language Gap

Hand holding a smartphone displaying the Anthropic "AI" logo, against a colorful collage background with illustrated icons including a code speech bubble, tangled scribble, geometric shapes, megaphone, and DNA helix.

Expressive Governance Is a First Amendment Threat Hiding in Plain Sight

United Nations Office Geneva located in the Palais des Nations building in Switzerland. Shutterstock

United Nations Office Geneva located in the Palais des Nations building in Switzerland. 

The Three Temptations Facing the UN's First Global AI Dialogue in Geneva

Broken Chair or Chaise Cassee is a wooden sculpture by the Swiss artist Daniel Berset and Louis Geneve outside the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Shutterstock

 is a wooden sculpture by the Swiss artist Daniel Berset and Louis Geneve outside the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. 

In Geneva, the World Can Anchor AI Governance in Free Expression

The Capitol is seen in Washington, Monday, June 29, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Bipartisan Smorgasbord of Children’s Online Safety Legislation Passes the House

Collage-style illustration of two hands linking pinky fingers in a pinky promise against a cream paper-textured background. The hands are in black and white, with one wearing a red sleeve and the other a red sleeve with red nail polish. Decorative geometric shapes surround them: yellow circles, dark red rings, a grid pattern, parallel lines, and a cluster of navy dots.

Trust Issues Could Make or Break Agentic Commerce

The image shows a silhouette of a person, likely a woman, sitting on the floor in a dimly lit room. She is sitting near a large window with sunlight streaming in, creating a strong contrast between the light outside and the darker interior. The woman appears to be holding a phone or tablet, looking at the screen while leaning her arms on her knees. The overall mood of the image is reflective, perhaps suggesting a moment of contemplation or solitude. The setting seems to be indoors, with part of the room's furniture visible on the right-hand side.

Human Rights Experts Should Engage in Age Assurance Standards

The United Nations Office Geneva in the Palais des Nations. Shutterstock

The United Nations Office Geneva in the Palais des Nations. 

The World Doesn't Need Another UN AI Declaration. It Needs Architecture.

European officials release the “Tech Sovereignty Package” on June 3, 2026. Source

European officials release the “Tech Sovereignty Package” on June 3, 2026. 

Does Europe Really Have a Plan for Tech Sovereignty?

A neural network comes out of the top of an ivory tower, above a crowd of people's heads (shown in green to symbolise grass roots). Some of them are reaching up to try and take some control and pull the net down to them. Watercolour illustration.

How AI Keeps Europe Hooked on US Cloud

The Trump administration was all-in on using AI to slash federal regulations before the president’s second term had even begun. In November 2024, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy 

 a vision for AI-powered deregulation, and since January 2025, 

 (the Department of Government Efficiency) and other 

 have sought to use large language models to undo swaths of regulations with barely any human oversight. This maximalist strategy would sacrifice the careful work of federal regulators for the sake of speed.

In May, a federal court dispensed the administration a dose of reality. The case, 

American Council of Learned Societies v. National Endowment for the Humanities

, concerned an initiative closely related to DOGE’s deregulatory push: its mass cancellation of NEH grants in 2025.

In litigation, an unsettling story emerged. Shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration and his mandates to terminate funding for “

diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility

,” two young DOGE staffers arrived at NEH. They fed descriptions of hundreds of NEH grants into ChatGPT with the prompt, “Does the following relate at all to DEI?”

The chatbot produced bizarre outputs. For example, it flagged a grant to a whaling museum in the Northeast. The offense: the museum sought to “create an inclusive and impactful experience, which is aligned with DEI principles.” So too an academic study of how the plastics industry influenced municipal policy across the country. ChatGPT’s substantive analysis was limited to: “#DEI.”

Beyond this incoherence was something far more disturbing. In numerous cases, ChatGPT’s “DEI” classification was based solely on a grant description’s reference to a particular race or gender. For instance, it flagged funding for a documentary about the Colfax Massacre because the film “explores a historical event that significantly impacted Black civil rights.” Other termination rationales included, “This proposal aims to expand understanding of Black life and geography during slavery,” and, “The book explores a Black-led project.”

DOGE endorsed this crude approach. One of the DOGE members testified that funding for a documentary surfacing the slave labor of Jewish women during the Holocaust was properly canceled because it was “specifically focused on Jewish cultures” and the “voices of the females in that culture.” In the end, DOGE rubber-stamped ChatGPT’s outputs, adopting them wholesale as the basis for terminating more than 1,400 grants.

The court found the DOGE cuts unconstitutional multiple times over. Terminating funding based on its purported connection to “disfavored ideas” violated the First Amendment, and canceling grants because they made reference to a particular race, gender, or other protected class defied the Constitution’s promise of equal protection.

DOGE’s use of ChatGPT was relevant to the court’s analysis. The bluntness—indeed, candor—of the dialogue between DOGE and ChatGPT made the government’s discriminatory motivation clear. The user explicitly asked the chatbot to discriminate; the chatbot obliged. Recall, for example, the grant canceled because ChatGPT noted that it “explore[d] a Black-led project.” This kind of smoking gun is 

For its part, the government tried to distance itself from ChatGPT’s outputs. It insisted that the exchange with ChatGPT did not taint the ultimate termination decisions, and instead merely provided “

.” The court understood the government to be saying, “It wasn’t me; it was ChatGPT,” and rejected the defense. “Here,” the court found, “DOGE selected the AI tool, formulated the prompt, and defined the operative viewpoint-based criterion: whether a grant relates at all to DEI.” DOGE “adopted the classifications and supporting rationales that were generated by ChatGPT to justify terminating grant after grant,” and the court ruled that “those classifications are the Government’s own for constitutional purposes.”

. Like any other tool, they can be used prudently or irresponsibly. To be sure, unlike, say, legal research databases, word processors, or pens, LLMs are generative—of prose, of answers to questions, of rationales. Consequently, agencies might be tempted, both in the funding and regulatory contexts, to treat LLMs as though they were themselves decision-makers. That could mean reflexively ratifying or 

 an LLM’s output, as DOGE did. It could also reflect a more profound category error that 

 alludes to: treating an LLM as though it were itself a 

—an “independent, intervening actor,” in the court’s words.

Agencies that treat LLMs as decision-makers—either because of a genuine belief in the high-verisimilitude text they produce or a desire to “

” with hastily written rules—open themselves to significant risk. As was on vivid display in 

, LLMs have a penchant to say inapt and incorrect things and have proven 

 to push back on misguided or malign instructions. Outsourcing decision-making to tools with these tendencies creates self-evident issues. Agency regulations—which determine, among many other things, the integrity of the US financial system and the safety of its transportation networks—should be well-founded, considered, and reasonable. Over-reliance on LLMs also creates legal problems, as I have 

 in Tech Policy Press before. Among other things, arbitrary and unsupported agency actions are unlawful.

This is not to say that regulators cannot responsibly and productively use LLMs. Indeed, LLMs might prove well-suited to many tasks agency policymakers must perform: for instance, reviewing relevant literatures, articulating competing views on a particular matter, identifying weaknesses in draft regulatory proposals, and drafting legal and policy analyses. But, like any other tool used in regulatory work, LLMs should be deployed in processes designed to take advantage of their strengths with safeguards keyed to their weaknesses. That means, as I have written about 

, that agencies must train their staff on LLMs’ known limitations and develop protocols to mitigate LLMs’ tendencies toward sycophancy and hallucination. Most importantly, agencies should use LLMs only to the extent that accountable agency officials can meaningfully review and validate their work. An LLM might not be suitable for a task if it is impracticable for the agency to determine if the model has produced an accurate and reliable output. As agencies craft best practices for LLM use, the 

 decision should serve as a handbook of what not to do.

LLMs are certain to have important applications in federal administration, but only with the right safeguards. 

 is a wake-up call that plans to outsource regulatory decision-making to LLMs are misguided—and, if nothing else, will not work.

Next week in Geneva, two important United Nations processes designed to govern digital technologies will intersect. One will review a two-decade multilateral process “to build a people-centered, inclusive, and development-oriented Information Society,” while the other will mark the UN’s first formal foray into the governance of artificial intelligence. The success of the newer process will hinge in large part on its ability to build on and learn from the former.

 (WSIS) Forum, which runs from 6 to 10 July, brings ministerial delegations and other stakeholders together annually to review, encourage, and coordinate state and non-state efforts along eleven “action lines.” At the same time 

 in the same venue, the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI (UNGDAI) will take place, convening government officials, company representatives, and civil society organizations — 

 heads of state and company leaders — “to discuss international cooperation, share best practices and lessons learned, and to facilitate open, transparent and inclusive discussions on artificial intelligence governance.”

This overlap is intentional. AI governance initiatives have proliferated locally and globally over the last two years, and the UNGDAI has the potential to help build coherence across those efforts. While that is a daunting task, the WSIS process offers valuable lessons on how (and how not) to attempt such governance coordination. Perhaps more importantly, it can help illuminate the technical and social arrangements that govern the Internet, which constitutes the technical and social substrate upon which AI is built.

, and learning lessons should not be equated with rote repetition or modeling. That said, too many of the leading stakeholders participating in AI governance seem unfamiliar with — or uninterested in — this deeply intertwined and relevant history. The overlap between WSIS and the UNGDAI presents an important learning opportunity.

Last year, the WSIS+20 review process offered an opportunity to reflect on the relevance of the WSIS framework, understand its role within the evolving digital governance landscape, and reimagine what a people-centered, inclusive, and development-focused information society means today. Throughout that review, key questions included how emerging UN processes like the UNGDAI can and should coexist with WSIS, how they can complement and strengthen each other, and what lessons from WSIS can be applied to these new processes. When answering these questions, it is helpful to analyze what WSIS did well, what it was wise to avoid, and what it did not do well.

. When WSIS was initially convened, the Internet was just beginning to scale and policymaking on relevant topics such as spectrum allocation, infrastructure buildout, and liability rules was largely defined by national governments. But WSIS, reflecting the wide spectrum of organizations involved with and interested in the early Internet, convened an unprecedented range of civil society organizations, technologists, companies, youth organizations, and religious leaders. WSIS was the first global process to formally embrace a multistakeholder approach to governing digital technology, recognizing that “governments, as well as the private sector, civil society and … international organizations have an important role and responsibility in the development of the Information Society and, as appropriate, in decision-making processes.”

The first global AI safety summits – in 

 in 2024 – were relatively small convenings, with high-level representatives from OECD governments and tech companies conspicuously overrepresented. The 2025 Paris AI Action Summit featured broader civil society participation, but attendees remained primarily American and European. In February, the 

While next week’s UNGDAI will be a substantially smaller affair, it should feature a range of speakers who can bring diverse perspectives from different stakeholder groups, geographies, experiences, and expertise.

Going forward, it will be critical for the UNGDAI’s secretariat and the co-chairs of the second UNGDAI, which will take place in New York in May 2027, to think creatively about how to ensure broad and diverse representation, especially from marginalized communities. In doing so, they should draw on 

 forged over decades of Internet governance experience and recent examples such as the 

Informal Multistakeholder Sounding Board,

 which was established to drive diverse participation in the WSIS 20-year review process.

Elevate Global South priorities and participation

. While WSIS has not been immune from overarching power dynamics and practical limitations that consistently challenge the democratic legitimacy of multilateral processes, it has nevertheless enabled Global South engagement by explicitly linking digital policy to development, including the UN’s 

. National and regional implementation of the WSIS Action Lines enables the framework to be adapted to local realities and needs, and encourages participation from local stakeholders.

It will be critical for the UNGDAI to reflect Global South priorities in its agenda and outcomes. In addition to engaging directly with external initiatives committed to elevating Global South and civil society participation in AI governance, such as 

, it can also align with and support relevant WSIS themes, action lines, activities, and messages.

This can include developing capacity-building mechanisms for AI, encouraging linguistic diversity in LLMs, promoting financing mechanisms to expand access, preserving cultural heritage in digital content, understanding the upstream social and environmental impacts of AI, fostering risk mitigation and redress measures, ensuring that human rights are centered in AI design and deployment, in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and establishing safeguards to prevent adverse impacts arising from the use of digital and emerging technologies – ideas that are reflected in the 

 and have been echoed in UNGDAI consultation 

Articulate a comprehensive approach to access.

 WSIS recognized that meaningful access to digital technologies requires a comprehensive approach—addressing affordability, creative financing, digital literacy, and localized content through relevant policy frameworks. WSIS formalized this approach in the 

, breaking access down into the dimensions of infrastructure, affordability, capacity building, and content.

 on four thematic pillars: (i) AI opportunities and implications; (ii) bridging AI divides; (iii) safe, secure, and trustworthy AI; and (iv) respecting, protecting, and promoting human rights. As these are unpacked, participants would do well to draw connections between these themes and relevant WSIS action lines, as well as to acknowledge that efforts to “bridge” digital divides must be front-and-center and approached holistically and in a multidimensional way.

WSIS avoided rigid standardization by designing a framework based on flexibility, decentralized cooperation, and high-level principles rather than top-down rules. The Geneva Declaration recognized that digital policy needs to be context-specific by encouraging national governments and regional bodies to implement the WSIS Action Lines and by avoiding attempts to consolidate standard-setting authority within UN bodies.

AI standards processes are already proliferating across a wide range of standards bodies, most of which have also been involved in setting and stewarding key Internet protocols and standards. While the UN can play an important role in helping to draw attention to and encourage participation in these processes, it should continue to resist any impulse to govern them.

: WSIS was successful in part because it did not decide to pursue a global treaty or otherwise establish processes to centralize or unify Internet rule-making. Instead, it created an inclusive and adaptable ecosystem for digital policy and development, embracing a multistakeholder approach that acknowledged and created space for discussions of, but not top-down decisions about, the respective roles of governments, the private sector, civil society, and the technical community.

Central to this approach was the establishment of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which has become a key global platform for open, inclusive, and non-binding discussions of internet policy. The value of this approach was recognized last year when the WSIS+20 review permanently renewed the IGF’s mandate. The IGF's components, including its network of 

intersessional policy networks and dynamic coalitions

, are vital to maintaining its inclusive, bottom-up nature. The UNGDAI and other AI-focused governance processes would be wise to plug into and build directly upon this inclusive, transparent, local-to-global infrastructure of convenings, expertise, and experience, rather than to try to create something new from whole cloth.

 for its lack of tangible outcomes from dialogue, as well as for 

 to develop effective mechanisms to mitigate digital divides and govern what is now a highly commercialized, geopolitically contested, and rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. While important issues have been identified and discussed within the WSIS framework, and some responsive actions have resulted, its underlying objectives have not been effectively resolved. Currently, there is an active debate on how to make the IGF more effective, with the WSIS+20 outcome document calling for the creation of a government track, enhanced intersessional work, and a stronger Secretariat (this will be the 

These are challenges that the UNGDAI should acknowledge from the jump. While the Scientific Panel can provide timely insights into emerging risks and challenges, and the Dialogue can bring diverse stakeholders together to share knowledge and approaches on urgent issues, the success of the process will depend not just on how inclusive and responsive the actual Dialogues are, but also on how it is able to bring coherence and continuity to the efforts that are organized in between and around them.

The UNGDAI should focus on outcomes, ensuring that its convenings generate relevant and ambitious commitments from all sectors, establishing or embracing existing mechanisms to transparently track progress and drive accountability. The impacts of AI are generating significant attention and resources, which should be leveraged to support this architecture of action, including support for civil society efforts to hold government and private sector actors accountable.

What Needs to Happen in Geneva and Beyond

The co-chairs of the UNGDAI, with support from a Secretariat drawn from relevant UN agencies and offices, have done well to set up an open, inclusive process to help shape the Dialogue. They have 

 closed consultations with member states, as well as public consultations open to all stakeholders; 

 written inputs on process and substance; 

 four thematic clusters around which the agenda will be shaped and 

 mechanisms that promote collaboration. For a UN process that was authorized only 10-months ago, this is an impressive set of steps — especially in light of the broader political and funding challenges the UN system is facing.

Notwithstanding these efforts, a lot of uncertainty remains with less than one week to go. While a skeleton agenda was published last month, key questions remain as to how the UNGDAI will balance its mandates to feature “a multi-stakeholder plenary meeting with a high-level governmental segment,” “a presentation of the [inaugural] annual report of the [Independent International] Scientific Panel,” and other “thematic discussions.” Organizations that 

 “side-event sessions” have only recently heard back about which will be included in the agenda, making travel and logistical coordination challenging.

Fortunately, the WSIS agenda provides an overlapping scaffolding of well-structured, multistakeholder sessions featuring business and civil society perspectives on topics ranging from 

Sex-Stratified Data and the Integrity of High-Risk AI.

” There are also critical sessions reflecting on the 

Initiatives like the Multistakeholder Approaches to Participation in AI Governance project (

 have also stepped in to facilitate travel support for Global Majority civil society experts, and a range of experts with diverse geographic perspectives, lived realities, and informed perspectives are 

 that build off of the two-day Dialogue, looking ahead toward the second one and to the Swiss government-hosted summit that will take place next year. MAP-AI and others are also doing important work to foster discussion, learning, and collaboration across key stakeholders, including by identifying 

As the UN develops international processes and frameworks for AI amidst rapid innovation, concentrated corporate power, and a divided geopolitical landscape, it cannot afford to start from scratch. Instead, it should examine successful strategies and learn from past failures in internet governance to prevent repeating the same errors.


 both previously served at the Federal Trade Commission. They recently published a memo, “

Settlement Wins Against Big Tech Should Underwrite Digital Resilience Funds

,” at the Federation of American Scientists.

In the foreground, multiple people are surrounded by computer screens filled with data visualizations, charts, and technical information. A woman seated in an armchair appears deep in thought, surrounded by data-filled monitors. Beside her, a man leans over, using a tablet to assist with their inspection of a plant or tree. In the centre, a figure holds a large frame or screen displaying anatomical illustrations, representing the use of AI to analyse medical imagery. To the left, another person is intently observing a computer screen, while a second figure nearby is deeply immersed in analysing data. A woman dominates the right side of the composition, gazing upwards as if in contemplation or envisioning something beyond the immediate scene. The background features more people, including a family holding hands, and other abstract representations of data.

As former attorney-advisors to Federal Trade Commission leadership, we worked hard to turn the page on the era when Big Tech could write off fines for alleged lawbreaking as just the “cost of doing business.” We fought to impose real, substantive limits on corporate data collection and to change the extractive business models fueling digital platforms. But our time in the trenches also taught us a hard truth: while strong injunctive relief and market reforms are vital, enforcement alone isn’t enough.

To truly protect the public, legal and regulatory action should be paired with a massive, proactive public education campaign. Today, as the honeymoon phase for generative AI ends and state attorneys general launch 

, we have the momentary opportunity to do just that: fund a “

The scale of these compounding digital harms resembles 

 rather than a series of unconnected consumer injuries. 

half of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, and most doubt their ability to tell whether words or images came from a machine. Gen Z seems to be increasingly anxious about this technology’s impact on their lives. A recent 

 shows their levels of optimism plummeting about how helpful the technology can be in education and especially as deployed in the workforce.

During the social media era, tech companies used algorithmic feeds to hijack our attention and our outrage. Generative AI, with its ability to mimic human communication and create photorealistic images, instead hijacks our trust, imagination, and empathy. As people anthropomorphize chatbots, we are witnessing a rise in parasocial dependency and loneliness and a sharp 

 to assign it empathy and cognition. This illusion of companionship creates a dangerous vulnerability.

Many of these immediate and acute threats are happening to consumers right now. We are seeing a surge in sophisticated, 

 driven by technology like voice-cloning and the 

 used for bullying and harassment. These harms also extend into our physical and civic lives. 

 systems have led to wrongful arrests that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. The unchecked flood of synthetic media threatens to 

 these are personal and systemic harms that thrive in an environment of confusion and low digital literacy.

The public is desperately asking for help. It wants clear, unbiased guidance on navigating AI, but right now the balance of messaging is coming from the tech companies themselves. These companies have little financial incentive to tell their users to be skeptical. Chatbots have been marketed as 

. The public needs to know the reality: that these tools are predictive text machines, that they 

, and the intimate information users share with them can be 

People deserve concrete solutions. Independent, public interest research and tools could help verify if an image or audio clip is real or synthetic, K-12 training on media skepticism could help protect children from algorithmic manipulation, training for workers to understand their rights if AI is being used for surveillance, or even better funding for the states’ prosecutorial and investigatory apparatus around tech harms could help. But without dedicated funding, who will be able to build and maintain these resources?

We are currently fighting an asymmetric battle on messaging with the companies. They have billions to spend on marketing to spin their narrative on AI. Public interest efforts cannot rely on shoestring budgets to provide the public accurate information. We need a massive and well-resourced investment in the truth to ensure that clear and unbiased guidance reaches the public where they are. We cannot miss this opportunity to build durable civic infrastructure to protect the public. Nor can we afford to subject another generation to the uncontrolled societal experiment that characterized the social media era. Regulators then relied on headline fines that simply disappeared into general government treasuries. Consider the Federal Trade Commission’s historic $5 billion settlement with Facebook in 2019. It was hailed as a historic victory, but as Commissioners 

 explicitly warned in their dissents, the penalty was unlikely to meaningfully deter the company’s underlying data-harvesting business model. Furthermore, by law, the FTC could not redirect that money to consumer education. But imagine what even a fraction of those funds could have done to educate consumers about their data privacy rights, or about social media’s 

Fortunately, a new wave of state-level litigation is offering another opportunity to break from the fine-and-forget enforcement model and potentially, put those fines to good use. Two recent cases target the root of these digital harms: defective algorithms and addictive product design. By framing these platforms as defective products engineered to exploit children, enforcers have bypassed the traditional 

. This breakthrough could open the floodgates for more systemic accountability.

 awarded a 20 year old plaintiff $6 million after finding that Meta and YouTube negligently designed their platforms and caused severe mental health crises under a theory of defective products liability. In the same month 

levied a historic $375 million penalty against Meta for violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act by misleading parents about the safety of their products thereby enabling child exploitation.

These verdicts could be bellwethers for a wave of impending litigation and settlements. Currently, a historic and “sprawling” set of consolidated lawsuits, known as 

 41 attorneys general, hundreds of school districts, thousands of individual personal injury suits, all consolidated and contesting the “‘unreasonably dangerous’ design of social media platforms.”

These cases, and others, mean billions of dollars may soon be changing hands. That means there’s the rare opportunity to direct a meaningful fraction of these billions towards digital resilience for the public. The critical policy question for state enforcers is whether those funds, after class members and direct victims are made whole through restitution, will disappear into general treasuries or be used to address the real problems confronting the public.

Ideally, governments would fund this education effort directly, but the current state lawsuits provide a rare opening to defend the public now. State Attorneys General and legislatures should be thinking now about how to structure the potential awards and remedies in these cases. 

, they should direct a portion of these settlement dollars into a Digital Resilience Fund, making sure victims are paid first, then funding the independent watchdogs, media literacy programs, and worker education needed to help people safely live alongside this technology.

Because legal remedies must typically address the specific harms alleged, these dollars can be highly tailored. For instance, if a lawsuit centers on a chatbot endangering minors, the fund could finance school-based AI literacy programs or research into the technology’s psychological impacts. For litigation focusing on deceptive data practices or deepfakes, awards could fund independent tech watchdogs to audit models or launch a campaign to help people spot synthetic media. State attorneys general are constrained in how they can use remedial funds, but state legislatures can step in to supplement these settlements or broaden their mandates. Partnering with them could help transform targeted legal remedies into expansive whole-of-society resilience programs.

 that this kind of public awareness program can work. When state attorneys general sued the tobacco companies, leading to the 

, they used that money to fund the Truth Initiative and education about these products—in perpetuity. By investing in evidence-based culture change around smoking, that campaign, along with new laws, permanently shifted American behavior and changed millions of lives for the better.

The Truth Campaign isn't the only example of successfully increasing societal resilience to pervasive harms. The 

 mandated that companies pay into abatement funds specifically designed to prevent and treat addiction at the community level. The 

 didn’t just fine the banks; it directed billions towards foreclosure prevention and housing counseling. 

 required that the company invest billions into an independent environmental mitigation trust. We can see this educational model working for digital harms, too. A 2023 

shows that when Finland instituted a whole-of-society media literacy program to combat online disinformation it built one of the world's most resilient publics against propaganda. We have the opportunity to build new institutions in the wake of this litigation and we should take it.

As former regulators and advocates on technology policy, we know that protecting the public is not only about guarding against risks. It must also be about equipping ordinary people, parents, the elderly, and kids most of all, with what they are plainly and desperately asking for: the knowledge and means to live with this technology, and to understand what the machine they can talk to in their pocket or at work is and really does.

In the United States, inspiring and steadfast local organizing by communities against data centers has created an incredible moment of leverage against all-powerful tech companies. While hugely consequential, stopping data centers in the US means little for the planet if they simply shift to Global Majority countries.

Thanks to the courage of local communities and formations such as the No Desert Data Center Coalition and Memphis Communities Against Pollution, the widespread local and global harms of data centers—such as over-extracting 

None of these consequences change if the data center is moved from Virginia to Visakhapatnam; but faced with domestic opposition, the US government and tech companies are pitching data center development to Global Majority countries, where governments are rolling out red carpets and favorable regulations, like in the 

 recently launched a proposal to attract data centers, 

 just changed policy to put data centers on par with ports, and in 

, the government announced further land allotments for Google’s flagship AI Hub data center.

 of its behaviors in the US: no public consultations, inflated job claims and thin transparency on energy and water consumption. However the difference is that avenues of pushback—journalism and citizen petitions—are promptly shut down. Just as an investigation by Dirty Data and Environmental Reporting Collective on contested land acquisition got some traction on Instagram, it was 

 of law enforcement. Similarly, the local police department reached out to X to restrict a post by the Human Rights Forum circulating a 

 calling for an immediate halt to the project and an independent environmental impact assessment.

Obstacles to organizing in the Global Majority

In Global Majority countries, data centers are part of a 

 of people being dispossessed of their land for industrial development, actively facilitated by the state. Small parcels of land held by some of the poorest and most marginalized in society, often without documentation, are prime targets for industrial development.

In India, at least two major data centers have run into land conflicts. The aforementioned Google data center in Andhra Pradesh, in partnership with AdaniConneX and Airtel, has put out staggering numbers about itself—$15 billion investments, 600 acres of land, 

. But verifying claims is harder than making them. The government denied a 

 filed by Human Rights Forum and the United Forum for RTI Campaign seeking the memorandum of understanding between authorities and these companies. Even with limited information in the public domain, journalists and citizens have intrepidly fact-checked this figure of job claims to actually be 

Defending one's land against corporations and foreign investment promoted by state officials means confronting a 

 as well as threats, intimidation, and arrests. As per 

, in 2024, 146 land and environmental defenders around the world were murdered or disappeared after speaking out or taking action to defend their right to land and a clean, healthy, sustainable environment. This is one of the most dangerous beats for journalists, with UNESCO reporting 

, a state in northeast Brazil, seven people from the Anacé Indigenous group have been placed in a protection program for environmental defenders because of their opposition to a data center for TikTok. Facing death threats, the Anacé have brought a formal complaint before federal authorities, asking them to halt the development of this data center. Like in Andhra Pradesh, this is not the first time that their land has been eyed by industry for developments including oil refineries and thermal power plants.

Most recently in South Africa, the Housing Assembly, a social movement representing over 20 communities in the Western Cape of South Africa have 

against a data center planned by Equinix, a US-based firm. The objection is that the land use application should be refused by the City of Cape Town as it has no required details on emissions, electricity, diesel generators, nor on the buildings themselves.

 from the United States to countries with 

 is a tried and tested playbook. Data centers are just the latest chapter. Building data centers outside of the US does not change the environmental consequences, from the depletion of groundwater to air pollution and dangerous heat islands; it merely shifts suffering to communities who are less able to speak out without repercussions.

Past improvements to the standards of US companies overseas required mammoth effort on the part of organizers with severely limited resources, operating in much worse conditions than US based organizers. The best examples often follow major disasters like 

For those of us in the Global North, let's not wait for these foretold disasters. Stopping data centers as communities in Tucson and New Brunswick have is an incredible victory against some of the most powerful fused interests of state and capital. We can use this momentum to not just block data centers here, but also connect with the rich legacy of movements against extractive industries in the Global Majority to make this a truly international fight.

This moment presents a generational opportunity to build an international movement of organizers and policymakers for a 

global green new deal. Success will require solidarity, new relationships, and the combined 

intelligence and resources of connected organizers worldwide. The same companies building hyperscalers in the United States are present everywhere from Chile to Indonesia. Organizers in the Global North should extend their analysis of the opposition beyond individual sites to the full picture of Big Tech’s global footprint. Communities should ask: if we win this site fight, is this data center likely to be relocated outside the US? This internationalist frame should be part of political education and public facing commentary so that anyone in the US opposing a site in their locality will stay activated to oppose it in other places as well.

US activists should commit to building relationships with peers outside the US; though those relationships may initially be awkward and stilted, they will help create enough mutual legibility and respect for a joint strategy to emerge. From there, activists across borders can seek new policy levers and legal mechanisms to regulate data centers in the interest of the people rather than capital.

June 22, 2026—Andy Burnham with colleagues from the Parliamentary Labour Party in Westminster Hall at the Houses of Parliament in central London, as he returns to the House of Commons to take up his seat after winning the Makerfield by-election. (Yui Mok/Press Association via AP Images)

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