GLOBAL
TWN: Majority reject WTO reform proposals amid credibility concerns – D Ravi Kanth
Attempts by the chair of the World Trade Organization’s General Council (GC) to drive progress through a seemingly irrational agenda for meetings on WTO reform apparently failed last week, with a large majority of developing and least-developed countries indicating that the proposed reforms lack credibility, said people familiar with the development.
Barring a small group of major developed and several middle-income countries – known as the “Friends of the System” group, which includes China – the majority of members sharply rejected any changes to consensus-based decision-making, self-designated special and differential treatment (S&DT), and other foundational issues, said participants who attended the meeting.
TechPolicyPress: Can the United Nations Bring the World Together on AI? – Chris Stokel-Walker
One of the most honest admissions in this year’s United Nations AI for Good Global Summit came from a diplomat, rather than a technologist — exposing the difficulty of governing AI for humanity’s benefit.
Annalena Baerbock, president of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, was asked on stage how the UN could give the Global South real power over AI’s rules rather than “a performative seat at the table.”
Her answer began with a concession designed to address criticism that the UN is slow to fix problems, but which underscored the challenge of doing anything at all. “The UN is always the sum of 193 member states,” she told the audience gathered in Geneva at the Palexpo conference center, and finding agreement among them “is not only not easy, but this is also almost impossible”. Looking at a world where AI capability is concentrated in a handful of states, she went further: “We would never be able to build this again.”
The 2026 edition was underpinned by one question, which also hangs over the UN’s entire AI agenda: at a moment when Washington, Brussels and Beijing are pursuing openly competing visions of AI governance, what can this institution feasibly do? “It’s a much more fragmented world,” says Philippe Metzger, secretary-general of standards-setting organization the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). “It’s much more difficult to reach consensus.”
The UN’s proposed solution has two key prongs: a new leaders’ club at the top, and, below the attention of most eyes, the technical rules that any future rulebook would need.
ASIA
TechTimes: India Challenges WTO Secretariat: Global Digital Trade Rules Lack Administrator – Jerry Owens
India submitted a formal legal paper to the World Trade Organization on July 9, 2026, challenging the legal authority of the WTO Secretariat — and by extension, Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala — to administer the world’s first baseline set of global digital trade rules. The move, reported by Borderlex and InsideTrade, exposes a governance gap that the ECA’s architects knew existed and chose to embed in the agreement anyway: without formal Annex 4 incorporation requiring all 164 WTO members’ consensus, the agreement’s own provisions for institutional administration may be legally unenforceable.
That gap is not an abstraction. The Electronic Commerce Agreement — adopted through interim arrangements by 67 WTO members covering approximately 70% of global trade on March 28, 2026 — contains Article 36, which mandates that the agreement be administered by the WTO Secretariat, and Article 27, which applies WTO dispute settlement procedures. Both provisions presuppose institutional access that is only available after Annex 4 incorporation. India’s challenge makes explicit what the agreement’s co-conveners left unresolved: a digital trade rulebook without an eligible administrator is, in practice, a rulebook without enforcement.
TechPolicyPress: Workers in Asia Are Fighting for Protections as AI Threatens Jobs – Lam Le
The dispute reflects a broader struggle unfolding across Asia as artificial intelligence reshapes workplaces and raises questions over who should benefit from productivity gains. In South Korea, unions at technology companies that have benefited from the AI boom are demanding larger bonuses and a greater share of corporate profits.
Major semiconductor companies, including SK Hynix and Samsung, have already agreed to record-high payouts, with some memory chip workers expected to receive bonuses up to $416,000.
But the debate extends beyond compensation. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and labor minister Kim Young-hoon have called on companies benefiting from AI-driven profits to share gains not only with their own employees but also with workers in different departments, suppliers and subcontractors. Samsung union’s own win has alienated its workers. Those in less lucrative sections received much smaller bonuses and, in protest, left the union in droves.
Across Asia — from South Korea to Singapore, China and the Philippines — workers and governments are taking steps to respond to AI’s impact on employment. The approaches vary widely depending on each country’s political system, labor institutions and stage of AI adoption.
RestofWorld: India’s crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent – Ananya Bhattacharya
The Indian government’s latest tussle with WhatsApp has raised concerns about the censorship of app features globally.
On June 29, WhatsApp began rolling out usernames globally, allowing users to chat without sharing their phone numbers. The Indian government has objected to the feature, arguing that pseudonymous accounts could make it easier for bad actors to impersonate others and carry out scams and financial fraud.
India has also sought explanations from Telegram and Signal, which already allow users to create accounts using usernames instead of phone numbers. The government asked all three platforms to respond by July 9. WhatsApp has reportedly submitted a written response, which the government is reviewing.
If WhatsApp gives in to India’s pressure, and modifies or scraps the feature, it could lead to far-reaching consequences that may discourage innovation and encourage copycat demands globally, Namrata Maheshwari, senior policy counsel and encryption policy lead at international nonprofit Access Now, told Rest of World.
TechPolicyPress: India’s Aadhaar Shows Foreign Dependencies Reach Beyond US-China – Meg Kitamura
When India launched Aadhaar in 2009, it was presented as a home-grown achievement — a proudly sovereign digital identity solution that would allow the country to chart its own technological future, free from dependence on American and Chinese technology firms. As part of its broader digital transformation, India positioned Aadhaar as evidence that digital infrastructure could serve the public interest rather than private, often foreign, corporations.
By 2025, Aadhaar had enrolled nearly 99% of India’s adult population, making it the world’s largest biometric identification system. What is rarely acknowledged, though, is that this feat would not have been possible without the involvement of NEC Corporation, a Japanese multinational information and technology company that supplied the fingerprint extraction and matching system at the core of Aadhaar.
NEC’s role is significant not because Japan poses the same geopolitical concerns as the United States or China, but because it reveals a broader blind spot in how digital sovereignty is understood.
Discussions of Aadhaar and India’s Digital Public Infrastructure have largely overlooked the role Japanese companies played in building its foundational identity layer. This omission reflects a broader problem with contemporary debates on digital sovereignty. Increasingly invoked by India, the European Union, and the BRICS countries as a response to dependence on American and Chinese technology firms, digital sovereignty has become less about eliminating dependency than about choosing among competing foreign partners. In the process, questions of democratic accountability risk being displaced by geopolitical calculations.
AFRICA
TechCabal: As algorithms shape financial inclusion, accountability must keep pace – Omoruyi Edoigiawerie
While public attention remains fixed on artificial intelligence (AI) tools that write, generate, and automate tasks, a more consequential transformation is quietly unfolding across Nigeria’s digital economy: algorithms are beginning to make decisions that affect people’s financial lives.
AI is increasingly being used to make decisions rather than merely assist humans. In Nigeria’s fast-growing fintech sector, algorithms are beginning to influence who gets access to credit, how customers are assessed, how fraud is detected, and how complaints are resolved. As these systems become more sophisticated, a critical question emerges: who is accountable when an algorithm makes the wrong decision?
EUROPE
Politico: Brussels claps back at Trump’s tech threats – Pieter Haeck and Mathieu Pollet
The European Commission fired back Monday at Donald Trump’s fresh tariff threats against Europe’s tech rules, just as EU and U.S. officials opened talks in Washington meant to repair their increasingly strained digital relationship.
“Our position is very clear,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters on Monday. “The EU and its member states have the sovereign right to regulate any economic activities on their territory.”
“The EU will respond swiftly and decisively,” Regnier added, should Washington follow through with “unilateral measures targeting such legitimate policies.”
The EU executive recently unveiled a long-awaited legislative package designed to reduce Europe’s years-long reliance on U.S. technology, which is increasingly seen as a strategic vulnerability. The plan is a long game: boosting European tech champions while giving governments new ways to shut U.S. players out of the most sensitive parts of the public-sector market.
“Protectionist measures in upcoming EU tech sovereignty laws risk undermining our partnership,” a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said in a statement to POLITICO, recalling the recent trade deal that “requires eliminating non-tariff barriers to trade.”
Politico: Trump’s court win reignites fight to sink €1.7T data deal with Europe – Ellen O’Regan and Alfred Ng
A United States Supreme Court victory for Donald Trump is prompting Europe’s most powerful privacy defenders to try to kill a data flow deal underpinning €1.7 trillion in transatlantic trade each year.
Privacy regulators and activists rushed into action after Monday’s ruling that granted Trump the right to fire members of independent agencies. They’re taking aim at the so-called Data Privacy Framework, a transatlantic deal that allows companies to easily send data from Europe to the U.S.
The challenges, if successful, would trigger massive upheaval in the technology sector — and come at a time of icy relations between Brussels and Washington on everything from access to AI technology to social media regulation and global chips supply chains. Trump has repeatedly lashed out at EU regulations and fines targeting U.S. Big Tech firms.
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), made up of national privacy regulators across Europe, said on Tuesday that it is assessing the U.S. court ruling and the “potential implications for the oversight mechanisms underpinning the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.”
TACD: Letter to EU Commissioner McGrath: TACD raises serious concerns over EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework
The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) has written to European Commissioner Michael McGrath to warn that recent developments in the United States raise serious doubts about the continued adequacy of the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. TACD says the independence of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, a key part of the framework’s enforcement structure, is now under threat.
TACD points to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which it says gives the U.S. President unprecedented power to remove members of more than 20 independent federal agencies, including the FTC, without cause. In TACD’s view, this undermines the political independence needed for the framework to satisfy EU data protection standards.
TACD calls on the European Commission to assess the impact carefully and, if needed, take action to protect people’s personal data, including revoking the adequacy decision if independence safeguards are no longer sufficient.
ORG: The end is nigh for US data transfers – Mariano delli Santi
Personal data transfers between the EU and the US are made possible by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (EU-US DPF), under which the US committed to protect personal data transferred to the US from its mass surveillance programmes. Data flows between the UK and the US depend on this scheme as well. The oversight of the framework rested on a number of US federal agencies, whose independence has now been gutted by the Supreme Court ruling.
The practical implications of this judgment are hard to understate for a country such as the UK, whose government and digital economy are highly dependent on US tech firms. It doesn’t only undermine the EU-US DPF, whose judicial invalidation is now guaranteed. US federal agencies have become structurally unable to act as meaningful legal guardians, making any future agreement with the US unworkable. Short-term fixes that were relied on in previous crises, such as Standard Contractual Clauses, would now prove ineffective: contracts are no solution against arbitrary State power, and there is no realistic prospect of a structural agreement being reached.
Hard truths require real solutions. The UK needs to depart from the failed path of technological dependency from the US and appeasement to US corporate interests. The new Labour leadership will have a difficult task at hand: charting a clear roadmap to digital sovereignty.
TheGuardian: EU chief pledges social media ban to protect children from ‘predatory algorithms’ – Jennifer Rankin
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has pledged an EU-wide social media ban for children after an expert group called for restrictions for those under 13.
“It is clear we need age-appropriate restrictions to platforms,” von der Leyen told reporters after the publication of a report on child safety online.
“This is not about whether children can access social media. It is about whether and when social media can access our children,” she said in remarks that also referred to “predatory algorithms”.
Promising a draft law in the autumn, she declined to specify a minimum age, but said she found the panel’s “staged approach” to internet use – recommendations by age group – “very convincing”.
FT: UK regulators to scrutinise top US cloud groups – Martin Arnold
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle will come under the purview of UK regulators for the first time from next week after the Treasury designated the four big US technology groups as critical service providers to Britain’s financial services sector.
The move to extend UK regulatory scrutiny to the four major cloud computing providers reflects growing concern about how institutions in the City of London are increasingly reliant on a small number of US Big Tech groups for many of their key operations. Anxiety about this issue has intensified in recent weeks after the administration of US President Donald Trump temporarily stopped Anthropic from giving European companies access to its latest AI model that can find previously hidden vulnerabilities in IT systems.
TheGuardian: Bank of England handed powers to regulate key tech firms including Amazon and Google – Kalyeena Makortoff and Dan Milmo
The Bank of England has been handed powers to regulate important tech firms including Amazon and Google from next week, amid fears that system failures could threaten financial stability and harm consumers.
From Monday, the Bank and fellow City regulator the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will be in charge of ensuring that four large-scale providers of cloud and tech services to banks are resilient and actively reducing the risk of cyber-attacks and major outages that could disrupt services for millions of people and businesses across the UK.
This will mean having “direct” oversight of local arms of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle and Microsoft, all of which have been identified as “critical third parties” by the UK government, according to an announcement on Friday.
The companies will have to prove they are carrying out adequate stress testing, showing how they respond to imagined emergency scenarios that put their operations under severe strain. They will also be forced to report to the Bank of England and FCA any major incidents such as cyber-attacks, power outages and the impacts of natural disasters.
TechPolicyPress: Europe’s AI Sovereignty Problem Runs Far Deeper Than Frontier Access – Frederike Kaltheuner and Leevi Saari
This weekend, the United States administration ordered Anthropic to cut off foreign access to two of its advanced AI models. In Europe, the news has been interpreted almost unanimously: a wake-up call that shows dependency means access can be cut off overnight.
In this series, we make the case that Europe’s AI market is deeply entangled with the ecosystems of dominant US players, in ways that boosting both supply and demand alone cannot disentangle. As a result, interventions that seek to secure sovereignty in AI risk leading to much more entrenched dependence. The first part of this series looks at the demand-side of things.
NORTH AMERICA
CNN: Trump threatened 100% tariffs on Europe. Here’s why nobody flinched – Elisabeth Buchwald
A year ago, when President Donald Trump threatened sky-high tariffs on nearly everything coming from everywhere, global markets trembled and foreign leaders scrambled. Now the same threat barely registers.
That’s largely thanks to a February Supreme Court ruling that stripped the president of his most potent tariff weapon and left him with far more limited options for making good on his threats. But the verdict hasn’t stopped Trump from trying anyway.
On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that any European country implementing a digital services tax would be “immediately met with a 100% tariff on any and all goods sent to the United States,” adding that the levy would “supersede trade deals” already in place.
USCongress: New Report Exposes South Korea’s Discriminatory Attacks on American-owned Businesses
This interim report, released by the House Judiciary Committee continues a broad pressure campaign against South Korea’s digital regulations. The report purports to detail South Korea’s history of “discriminating” against U.S. owned businesses extending to the latest imbroglio involving Coupang. The report (falsely) claims that South Korean authorities target U.S. companies for enforcement actions and have weaponised digital economy regulations.
The House Judiciary Committee also uses this report as a method to warn to other countries noting that “South Korea’s economic discrimination against American-owned businesses is part of a larger pattern of foreign governments weaponizing their broad discretion under competition laws and other regulatory regimes to shield their domestic industries from U.S. competition. It also directly violates its recent trade agreement with the United States.” Countries therefore need to be wary of signing up to trade deals that could be used to challenge domestic public interest regulation of the tech ecosystem.
USStateDepartment: The Digital Sovereignty Trap
The U.S. State Department comes out swinging against foreign countries attempting to wean themselves from dependance on U.S. tech! The U.S. government argues that by excluding U.S. tech providers, particularly from their AI ecosysttems, countries will stay a “generation behind”.
These days, few words flatter a government like “digital sovereignty.” It carries the music of independence, the dignity of self-rule, the promise that a nation holds its own destiny in its hands. So it is no surprise that the expression has been pressed into the service of a fashionable, fast-spreading policy debate.
Many countries have looked to the United Nations to be the great evangelist of that idea. Through its Global Digital Compact and the funds and machinery that some are trying to assemble around it, the organization presses toward a world in which every country commands what the Secretary-General’s own reports call an “irreducible minimum” of artificial intelligence—its own computers, its own data, its own models, raised at home and owned at home. A secretariat-proposed multibillion-dollar fund would help pay for the building. And a growing number of governments, persuaded that independence requires duplication, are drafting national AI strategies to match—each resolved to rebuild, inside its own borders, a stack that already exists somewhere else.
It is a seductive vision. It is also backward and counterproductive.
The champions of digital sovereignty believe they are arming their nations for the future. In truth they are marching them, in perfect and well-funded formation, into the past. Digital sovereignty was never a wall, and it was never a copy. It was always a frontier—and the only nations that will be digitally sovereign in the age of intelligence are the ones bold enough to keep pushing it outward, into the territory no one has built yet.
CNBC: Trump bought Apple, Nvidia and other tech giants before tariff reversal fueled rebound – Alex Harring and Luke Fountain
President Donald Trump made 327 stock purchases on April 8, 2025, according to a CNBC analysis of newly released financial disclosures, as markets reeled from his sweeping “liberation day” tariff plan.
The next day, Trump posted that it was a “GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” before announcing a partial tariff retreat that helped send the S&P 500 up roughly 9.5% in one of its best days on record.
Trump’s April 8 buying spree focused heavily on mega-cap tech stocks, including Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia, which rebounded sharply after his tariff reversal.
TheGuardian: ‘This was a righteous case. A holy war’: the lawyer who took on Meta and Google – and won – Jenny Kleeman
When Mark Lanier and his young client Kaley faced the tech giants in an LA courtroom earlier this year, it seemed a bigger battle than David v Goliath. But they scored a landmark victory, proving that the social media giants had created ‘addiction machines’ that harmed mental health. How did they pull it off?
LATIN AMERICA
FolhaDeSaoPaulo: Brazilians and Americans challenge Trump’s criticism of Pix at a hearing in the US
Quando abriu a caixa de correio de casa, na Flórida, Vinícius Nunes Pinto encontrou um cheque de um centavo. O selo para enviá-lo havia custado 74 centavos. Para o especialista brasileiro em meios de pagamento, o episódio resume um problema que sistemas de pagamento instantâneo procuram resolver: processos caros e lentos para movimentar pequenas quantias.
A história abriu o depoimento dele nesta segunda-feira (6) durante audiência do USTR (Escritório do Representante Comercial dos Estados Unidos), que acusa o Banco Central de favorecer o Pix de forma injusta e discriminatória em relação a outros meios de pagamento. Pinto participou da audiência pública realizada no âmbito da investigação aberta contra o Brasil com base na Seção 301 da Lei de Comércio dos EUA.
Depoentes brasileiros e americanos defenderam o sistema como uma infraestrutura pública que ampliou a concorrência, reduziu custos para consumidores e empresas e criou oportunidades de negócios, inclusive para companhias dos Estados Unidos.
O processo resultou na recomendação de uma tarifa adicional de 25% sobre produtos brasileiros e também questiona políticas do Brasil relacionadas ao Pix, desmatamento, etanol, propriedade intelectual e comércio digital.
Apesar das críticas apresentadas pelo governo Donald Trump, nenhum dos participantes do primeiro dia de audiências endossou a tese de que o Pix prejudica empresas americanas.
“A ideia por trás do Pix foi aumentar a inclusão financeira e promover a concorrência”, afirmou Melinda St. Louis, da Public Citizen, organização americana de defesa do consumidor. Segundo ela, o sistema de transações é uma infraestrutura pública digital, comparável à rede viária, à rede elétrica e até à moeda emitida pelo Estado, não uma empresa privada que concorre diretamente com companhias americanas.
USNews: Brazil’s Senator Bolsonaro Argues Against 25% US Tariff on Its Exports – Luciana Magalhaes
Brazilian Senator and presidential hopeful Flavio Bolsonaro on Tuesday argued to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) against a new 25% tariff on Brazilian goods, distancing himself from a policy that had been used as a cudgel to defend his father.
The son of former President Jair Bolsonaro has been caught between an ideological embrace of U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilians’ resentment of tariffs that Trump first imposed last year in an effort to derail a trial of the ex-president.
After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that policy, the USTR proposed a new 25% tariff on imports from Brazil under the Section 301 trade statute, accusing its South American trade partner of unfair practices. The USTR will make its final decision by July 15 after public hearings that began Monday, which were to be attended by Senator Bolsonaro.
In a roughly four-minute speech, Bolsonaro defended Brazil’s popular Pix instant payment system, according to people familiar with the matter and a recording by a participant. Washington has called the system an unfair threat to Visa and Mastercard.
“Pix is not a problem to be fixed, it is a solution,” he said in audio reviewed by Reuters, referring to the central bank payment system rolled out under his father.
AlJazeera: Flavio Bolsonaro asks Trump to delay tariffs on Brazil until after election
Brazilian presidential hopeful Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, is asking the Trump administration to delay proposed tariffs on Brazilian goods until after October’s election, as he tries to counter allegations from President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that his family helped bring them about.
The announcement came shortly after Bolsonaro met senior US officials in Washington, prompting accusations back home that he had invited US pressure on Brazil, with Lula accusing the right-wing senator of lobbying Washington to impose the tariffs.
He has since doubled down on those accusations, saying in a social media post last week, “the origin of all this was motivated by the Bolsonaro family itself” and that Bolsonaro’s request to delay the tariffs until after the election was “yet another act of treason against the Fatherland”.
Bolsonaro rejects the allegation, arguing instead that it’s Lula who would gain a political advantage if the tariffs were imposed.
TechPolicyPress: Big Tech’s Proxy War Against Brazil’s New Platform Accountability Rules – Tatiana Das
Just hours after the Brazilian government published decrees expanding the liability of internet providers in Brazil last month, a congressional offensive to strike down the new rules began. Within 24 hours, 26 legislative decree proposals had been filed to suspend or amend them.
The move was visibly coordinated. The proposals were submitted by lawmakers from right-wing and far-right parties — most from PL, the party of former president Jair Bolsonaro — and share nearly identical arguments. Some are word-for-word the same.
With the decrees, the picture that emerges is one of coordinated pressure on multiple fronts: in Congress, through legislative decrees; in the public debate; and now on the geopolitical stage, with Washington using tariffs as leverage to defend American corporate interests in Brazil’s digital market.
For the Lula government, the question is beyond regulatory. It is whether Brazil has the autonomy to set the rules of its own digital environment, or whether that decision will be negotiated, as it was in 2025, in closed meetings with the tech giants themselves.
