Curated by Juan Ortiz-Freuler – August 10th – Sign up to mailing list
🔀🇰🇷[NEWS- South Korea launches sovereign AI plan…and Non-Aligned services?]
“South Korea has tasked some of its biggest companies and promising startups to build a national foundational AI model using mainly domestic technology, in a rare move to keep the country apace with the U.S. and China. The project will feature South Korean technologies from semiconductors to software, as Seoul looks to create a near self-sufficient AI industry and position itself as an alternative to China and the U.S”
🇰🇷📱🇺🇸[NEWS- Tesla-Samsung $16.5 billion supply deal may spur chipmaker’s US contract business]
“Tesla CEO Elon Musk said late on Sunday that Samsung’s new chip factory in Taylor, Texas would make Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chip. This could re-energize Samsung’s project, which has faced long delays because the company had trouble retaining and attracting major clients.”
🇺🇸📱🇨🇳[NEWS- Nvidia, AMD to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US]
“The revenue share applies to Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 chips, the report said, citing a U.S. official, noting that the Trump administration had yet to determine how to use the money. The chipmakers agreed to the arrangement as a condition for obtaining export licences for the Chinese market that were granted last week, FT reported.”
📱🇺🇸[NEWS- WhatsApp banned from official US House of Reps. devices]
“US, “Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.”” https://www.reuters.com/world/us/whatsapp-banned-us-house-representatives-devices-memo-2025-06-23/
🇪🇸🇨🇳[NEWS- Spain under fire for contracting Huawei to store judicial wiretaps]
“Spanish outlet The Objective reported this month that Huawei won a €12.3 million contract from the Ministry of the Interior to store the country’s judicially authorized wiretaps used by both law enforcement agencies and intelligence services.
The Spanish ministry believes “the contract complies with the cybersecurity regulations established by the National Cryptologic Center,” a spokesperson told POLITICO in a statement. The deal did not entail “any security risk,” they added.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-huawei-contract-judicial-wiretaps/
🇪🇺[NEWS- Can Microsoft defend EU from US over-reach?]
“Microsoft says it “cannot guarantee” data sovereignty to customers in France – and by implication the wider European Union – should the Trump administration demand access to customer information held on its servers.
The Cloud Act is a law that gives the US government authority to obtain digital data held by US-based tech corporations irrespective of whether that data is stored on servers at home or on foreign soil. It is said to compel these companies, via warrant or subpoena, to accept the request.
Talking on June 18 before a Senate inquiry into public procurement and the role it plays in European digital sovereignty, Microsoft France’s Anton Carniaux, director of public and legal affairs, along with Pierre Lagarde, technical director of the public sector, were quizzed by local politicians.
Microsoft was asked if a data request was well framed, would the corporation be “obliged to transmit the data?”
Carniaux admitted: “Absolutely, by respecting this process. But again, this has not affected any European company, or a public sector body, since we have been publishing these transparency reports.”
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/microsoft_admits_it_cannot_guarantee
🇺🇸🤖🇨🇳[NEWS- Experts concerned with runaway AI call for US-China collaboration]
“Renowned scientists and business leaders from the US and China are calling for greater collaboration in the field of artificial intelligence amid growing concerns that humanity might lose control of the rapidly evolving technology.”
“Hinton warned that AI was akin to a “cute tiger cub” kept as a pet by humans, but which could become dangerous as it matured. He stressed the importance of preventing this scenario through international cooperation, drawing parallels to US-Soviet collaboration on nuclear non-proliferation during the Cold War.”
🇪🇺🇨🇳[NEWS- Central Europe’s geopolitical fault lines]
“These political trends originate predominantly from domestic dynamics and ideological battles. Local illiberal leaders have leveraged social grievances tied to the shock therapy of the 1990s, tapped into the region’s entrenched social conservatism, and exploited long-standing urban–rural and center–periphery divides.
But increasingly, these domestic trends are also shaping the region’s geopolitical orientation — adding a layer of strategic ambiguity to its relationship with the EU and further exacerbating the tensions stemming from economic dependence and structural misalignment. The result is a space where EU membership coexists with limited policy autonomy and growing openness to alternative capital and geopolitical alignments — conditions that China, more than any other actor, is now actively testing.”
https://jacobin.com/2025/07/central-eastern-europe-economic-divisions
🇷🇺🇪🇺🇺🇸🇨🇳[NEWS/Analysis: Geopolitical tension surrounding undersea cables]
“Subjects of suspected sabotage, espionage and rising global tensions, undersea cables are no longer just technical infrastructure. They are now seen as strategic assets in geopolitics.” [interviews with Katja Bego and Brendon J. Canno]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsHm4m2WhwI (undersea cables)
🇮🇷🧭[NEWS- Iran moves to abandon US-led GPS and join Chinese led BeiDou]
“Iran’s decision to explore adopting China’s navigation satellite system may appear at first glance to be merely a tactical manoeuvre. Yet, its implications are far more profound. This move is yet another indication of a major global realignment.
For decades, the West, and the US in particular, have dominated the world’s technological infrastructure from computer operating systems and the internet to telecommunications and satellite networks.
This has left much of the world dependent on an infrastructure it cannot match or challenge. This dependency can easily become vulnerability. Since 2013, whistleblowers and media investigations have revealed how various Western technologies and schemes have enabled illicit surveillance and data gathering on a global scale – something that has worried governments around the world.”
📖Long read: “Preliminary performance analysis of BeiDou-2/GPS navigation systems over the low latitude region“
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jag-2023-0052/html
[email me for a copy if needed]
🕷️✂️🛡️[OPINION: Kill Switch Shield and the recurring erosion of trust in US tech]
“For decades, government anxieties regarding the internet centered on data “pulls” (mass surveillance programs siphoning information) from sovereign states and data “pushes” (flooding nations with targeted influence campaigns). In the emerging internet governance era, the focus is on data cuts: when governments and companies get cut off from the network, unable to access their information or contacts. In June 2025, the Chief Prosecutor to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email account….”
https://www.techpolicy.press/kill-switch-shield-and-the-recurring-erosion-of-trust-in-us-tech
The responses emerging from the EU mapped onto the typology:
a) Existing typology
Ref: https://policyreview.info/pdf/policyreview-2025-2-2009.pdf
b) Typology as deployed in Microsoft-EU context:
📚Reading group:
Guilherme Cavalcante Silva and Juan Ortiz Freuler are coordinating a reading group to explore the value of dependency theory for analyzing north-south tech dynamics. If you’re interested, send an email to juanof@protonmail.com , gcsilva@yorku.ca . Next meeting Aug 26.
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