The ITS Digital Dispatch is an occasional publication in which invited contributors write in their personal capacity about current issues in telecommunications and technology in general. The views expressed are those of the authors alone and do not represent the positions of the International Telecommunications Society or any affiliated institution. Readers are encouraged to engage with the ideas presented and to contribute to the ongoing conversation.
Emerging Trends Affecting Space Law, Regulation, and Governance
by Rob Frieden, Academy and Emeritus Professor, Penn State University, rmf5@psu.edu
For several decades, governments have accessed outer space for national security, exploration, navigation, weather, and scientific research missions. Recently, new commercial market segments have developed, including widely available and affordable broadband, earth and atmospheric monitoring, cheaper spacecraft construction, and diversifying launch options. Prospective opportunities include orbiting data centers, tourism, extraction of quite valued minerals from asteroids, expanded, and even colonization of the Moon and Mars.
This post assesses whether massive investment in space will continue, despite substantial risk from chronic, emerging, and theoretical factors, often ignored or underestimated in their severity. A realistic risk assessment considers the “gravitational pull” of issues potentially raising cost and uncertainty.
Public and private stakeholders appear to underestimate and discount the adverse impacts of proliferating space debris, higher likelihood of spacecraft collisions, environmental harm, orbital congestion, and reduction in the pace of reduced costs.
Space Commerce Exuberance
Some of the world’s richest and most creative entrepreneurs consider space a largely untapped frontier ripe for commercial exploitation. They have heavily invested in ventures offering faster, better, smarter, and cheaper alternatives to existing services, and aspire to incubate new market segments. For example, Elon Musk believes deploying Artificial Intelligence in space will cost less than using terrestrial facilities in the next few years.
Key Technology Developments
Much of the efficiency gains in space depends on a substantial reduction in spacecraft construction and launch costs, the ability to reuse launch vehicle components, and using different orbital configurations. Many of the new services from incumbent and recent market entrants use low Earth orbiting (“LEO”) satellites to connect directly with wireless handsets and also offer subscribers the ability to use their satellite terminals in multiple locations.
Data Centers in Space Case Study
Orbiting Data Centers (“ODCs”), located 300-1200 miles above earth, can tap solar energy continuously. Their “sun synchronous” orbital plane lies at the dividing line separating day and night areas below and provides a potential solution to the increased public opposition to terrestrial installations that require massive amounts of power and water, the costs of which are spread among all users, including residential subscribers whose demand typically does not trigger the need for expedited construction of more costly infrastructure.
ODCs have become plausible alternatives to Terrestrial Data Centers (“TDCs”), now much reviled by the general public who have soured on the aspiration of Big Tech to dominate all aspects of the global AI economy. Pursuing space orbiting alternatives, in large part, results from growing opposition to hyperscale TDC proposals.
The ODC Alternative
ODCs conceptually offer lower cost alternatives to many terrestrial cost and negative societal impact concerns: lower power and coolant expenses, plus possibly less regulatory and public relations costs. ODC operators can pitch their projects as “green” solutions to terrestrial environmental harms.
However, there are many issues that collectively can dampen space commerce enthusiasm. Notwithstanding, Elon Musk’s bold predictions, ODCs will likely have higher capital and operating costs for the foreseeable future, despite declining spacecraft launch costs, and better scale economies from assembly line manufacture of small satellites. Offsetting higher costs include the inability to make upgrades or repairs, and risk of component damage from radiation.
Additionally, space commerce boosters may have overstated the extent to which operating in space qualifies for less regulatory oversight. Multinational government forums and national governments have asserted jurisdiction over satellites based on the location of launches, terrestrial gateway earth stations, and who issued licenses to operate and use radio spectrum.
The prospect of vastly more spacecraft increases the odds of collisions and the generation of even more space debris requiring tracking and avoidance. Additionally, international administrative, registration, and coordination procedures have only managed the 15,000 orbiting satellites, not the millions anticipated. The United Nations and International Telecommunication Union will have to streamline, expedite, and manage a vastly more complex process for registering spacecraft, governing space, managing and conserving space and spectrum resources, while updating existing space treaties in response to substantial changes since their enactment.
The Best and Worst Case Scenarios
The lack of any recent calamity in space has supported bullish forecasts driven by declining launch costs, substantial reduction in power and heat management expenses, benign or ineffectual governance, the absence of costly space resource conservation requirements, such as space debris mitigation, and easy access to debt, equity, and insurance.
However, the need to match terrestrial efficiency in information processing and other outputs, or come close, runs up against major technical challenges such as size and weight limitations in launching spacecraft, power production capability of smallsats, and data processing from miniaturized plant. ODC proponents have not clearly shown how even a massive constellation of small satellites can equal the output available from current and proposed hyperscale centers.
The deployment of several million more spacecraft in LEO will significantly increase spacecraft collision risk and space debris proliferation. A single collision could trigger an increase in insurance and diminish space commerce investment exuberance. Reaching a critical inflection or tipping point of increased risk, uncertainty, and cost could substantially diminish the upside potential of space commerce.
Legal, Regulatory, and Governance Uncertainties
In the U.S. EU, and other nations regulatory oversight has been limited and narrowly focused, mostly executing responsibilities established in five space treaties. Recently, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission imposed more time-sensitive responsibilities on satellite operators to deorbit decommissioned spacecraft. On the other hand, the FCC seeks to limit the scope of environmental assessments required of new service applicants.
Preliminary Conclusions
Space commerce currently appears to benefit from irrational exuberance. Launches of prototype satellites will occur soon, but there remains much uncertainty whether a realistic business case can be made for many projects. Vastly more LEO spacecraft and “paper satellites,” not yet launched, if ever, will test whether ITU spectrum planning and orbital plane coordination can effectively manage potentially conflicting registrations. It remains unclear whether millions of sun synchronous orbiting satellites can avoid signal interference and coordination conflicts.
ODC commercial prospects may trend down from irrational exuberance to cautious optimism based on more realistic determinations of regulatory forbearance opportunities, spacecraft collision coordination and collision avoidance costs, development of AI revenue streams, efficiency gains, and recognition that operating in space does not eliminate environmental and other fears, uncertainties, doubts, and risks.
Digital Regulation in a Fast‑Changing World: A New Research Handbook
by Roslyn Layton (PhD), Visiting Researcher, Centre for Communications, Media and Information technologies (CMI), Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, roslynlayton.com
The pace of innovation in digital technology has far outstripped the ability of traditional regulatory institutions to cope. As platforms, AI systems, cloud infrastructure, and satellite networks reshape economies and societies, governments are struggling to keep up with the legal, economic, and social implications. A new Research Handbook on Digital Regulatory Agencies (Edward Elgar, 2026) edited by Martha Murillo, Ian MacInnes, and Roslyn Layton steps into this gap, offering a comprehensive, multidisciplinary look at how digital regulation can be designed, rethought, and coordinated in the decades ahead.
This handbook brings together a wide range of distinguished authors—academics, regulators, and policy experts—who examine the core questions surrounding digital regulatory agencies. They explore how institutions can adapt to the distinct traits of the digital economy, how to balance innovation with risk, and how to preserve competition, privacy, and democratic values in an increasingly interconnected world. The volume surveys responses to changing digital technologies, from broadband access and AI oversight to cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, satellites, and health‑data governance. The book is structured around four main themes. First, it asks what role digital regulators should play: when is a dedicated “digital regulator” needed, what functions should such an agency perform, and how can it reconcile economic and social goals in digital markets?
Second, it turns to specific digital domains—broadband cost‑recovery models, IP interconnection in South Korea, the role of internet exchange points (IXPs), AI use in Latin America, jurisdictional questions in space law, cybersecurity institutions in the EU and the US, and the European Health Data Space—using international case studies to illustrate common patterns and divergent approaches. Third, the handbook looks at country‑level experiences, including New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, and Peru, to show how different political and institutional contexts shape the design of digital‑regulation frameworks. Finally, it addresses international cooperation, examining how digital regulatory agencies can coordinate across borders, how US–China competition affects AI governance, and how forums such as the UN and the ITU can support digital‑regulation, spectrum‑coordination, and space‑communications policy.
The contributors emphasize the need for flexible, context‑sensitive, and cooperative governance structures. They argue that regulators must move beyond one‑size‑fits‑all models and instead build institutions that can learn, adapt, and collaborate with other jurisdictions, civil society, and the private sector. Their analysis speaks directly to the challenge of governing technologies that are global in scope but embedded in national and regional legal and political orders.
For students, academics, and researchers in technology regulation, economics, politics, public administration, and sociology, the handbook provides a rich set of conceptual frameworks and empirical case studies. It is likewise a valuable resource for policymakers, regulators, and practitioners who are grappling with how to design and operate digital‑regulatory agencies in an era of rapid change.
Eli Noam (Columbia University) describes the book as a “masterful look at overcoming the gap” between innovation and regulation, praising its “coherent and forward‑looking perspective that will shape essential digital policy and regulatory institutions for decades.” Erik Bohlin (Ivey Business School at Western University) calls it a “welcome contribution” that offers a multi‑faceted account of the roles and responsibilities of regulators across diverse digital domains and geographic contexts.
If you are interested in digital regulation, platform governance, AI policy, broadband, cybersecurity, or international coordination, this Research Handbook offers a broad, yet grounded, map of the current landscape and the directions it might take in the years ahead.
ITS2026Tokyo: returning to where the ITS biennial story began
by Petrus Potgieter, Professor in Decision Sciences, University of South Africa, ITS Board member
This June, the International Telecommunications Society returns to the city where its biennial conference tradition began. The 25th ITS Biennial Conference – ITS2026Tokyo will take place at the International Conference Center, Waseda University, from 28 June to 1 July 2026, in conjunction with the 17th ITS Asia-Pacific Conference. Its theme, Navigating Digital Frontiers in a Turbulent World, could hardly be more timely.
For ITS members, Tokyo 2026 is not simply another conference. It is an anniversary and a return. The first conference held under the ITS name, ITS ’86, took place in Tokyo in December 1986. It was formally listed as the 6th International Conference, continuing the numbering of an earlier organisation, but it marked the beginning of the Society’s modern identity. At that time, liberalisation, privatisation and technological change were redrawing the boundaries of telecommunications policy and industry structure. Forty years later, many of the questions have changed, but the underlying ITS purpose remains familiar: to bring academic, business, policy and regulatory communities into serious conversation about communications, technology and society.
Tokyo has hosted the ITS biennial conference one other time since that inaugural meeting: the 18th Biennial Conference at Waseda University in 2010, under the theme Culture, Communication and the Cutting Edge of Technology. The 2026 conference therefore offers a rare moment of continuity. From Tokyo in 1986 to Waseda in 2010 and now back again in 2026, ITS members can look across four decades of debate: from public monopolies and competition policy to broadband platforms, mobile ecosystems, AI, data governance, digital resilience and the future of media.
The call for papers frames the conference around five broad clusters: governance, ethics and policy; digital inclusion, economy and society; security, sovereignty and resilience; infrastructure and emerging technologies; and media and communication futures. The agenda spans 5G and 6G, Open RAN, non-terrestrial networks, AI regulation, social media governance, cybersecurity, digital journalism, deepfakes, the metaverse and universal connectivity. This breadth is precisely what makes ITS distinctive: the Society does not treat communications as only an engineering problem, an economic market or a regulatory file, but as all of these at once.
The conference is organised by ITS and co-hosted by Waseda University’s Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Institute for Digital Society, and the Japan Society of Information and Communication Research. It is supported by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the KDDI Foundation and The Telecommunications Advancement Foundation, with sponsorship from KDDI Research, Inc.
Waseda University is readily reached by public transport: about ten minutes on foot from Waseda Station on the Tokyo Metro Tozai Line, five minutes from Waseda Station on the Toden Streetcar/Tokyo Sakura Tram, fifteen minutes from Nishi-Waseda Station on the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line, or around twenty minutes from JR Takadanobaba Station.
For ITS members, ITS2026Tokyo is both a commemoration and an invitation: to revisit the Society’s origins, renew its international networks, and help define the next generation of communications research and policy.
AI research: NOW
by P.H. Longstaff, Professor Emeritus Newhouse School of Public Communication, Syracuse University, ITS Board member
How does somebody who is not making AI systems do research on it or regulate it? Well, not many of us understand how our cars work but we do research on how often they break down and how often they get in accidents. You can do some of this car-related research online and ask people who have similar cars or have been in accidents. And there are government agencies who collect this kind of data on cars and use it to regulate how cars are equipped and the roads that they drive on.
For most of us we learn about AI by looking at what people say about it online (often different opinions) and what friends who have used it are saying about its usefulness. But there are no (or very few) government agencies who are collecting data about how it is used and what happens if there are AI accidents – responses that cause harm to people or property.
We know there are two types of AI: Large Language Models and those that are said to have Superintelligence. Customers (and citizens) are afraid that both will cause vast unemployment and the Superintelligence systems will decide someday that humans are irrelevant. Even people in the AI industry have voiced these fears and they are not clear about how to regulate AI systems when nobody is sure what will happen and when. Are governments capable of devising regulations for an industry that changes almost every day? We need data that is available almost instantly – and that is correct. And we need regulations that can change just as fast.
In the United States, AI systems are largely controlled by five major companies, which have so far persuaded the government to avoid regulation on the grounds that it could weaken competition with China. As a result, those companies are the primary holders of AI-related data. At what point do AI companies begin to function like government? As one former Trump administration official put it, “…this is a giant acid vat that will dissolve mediating institutions.”
Another question: if AI is a tool that is distributed by these five companies, are they responsible for the accidents they cause? Only if you pay for it? If you get it free online then any accidents (like a chat telling you that you should commit suicide) would be up to you, since there is no guarantee of accuracy.
For the governments, companies and researchers that make up ITS, there is a lot to think about in a very short time. We will do what we can to help you distribute the data you collect and ideas for the regulation of an industry that will change us all.
Emergency Management Is the Next Frontier of Telecom Resilience
by Joe Rowsell, Director of Regulatory Affairs at TELUS Communications
The first infrastructure many people touch in a disaster is the one in their hand. A phone becomes an evacuation alert, a call for help, a message that a loved one is safe, a map for a responder, or the only link between a community and the outside world. Behind those acts sits an extraordinary public-safety function: communications networks that must keep working when roads close, power fails, fires move, floods rise, or emergency crews need to restore service under pressure.
That is why emergency management should become a central frame for telecom resilience. The OECD (2025) has emphasized that critical infrastructure resilience depends on governance, risk assessment, partnerships, information-sharing, and clear roles before, during, and after disruption. For telecommunications, that means organizing policy around prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.
International practice is already moving in this direction. The FirstNet Authority in the United States oversees a nationwide public-safety broadband network built through a public-private partnership, with priority and pre-emption for public-safety users. Australia has supported telecommunications resilience through measures such as mobile network hardening, backup power, and disaster connectivity programs. The European Union Solidarity Fund can support the immediate restoration of critical infrastructure after major disasters, including telecommunications.
The lesson is not that one model travels everywhere. Geography, risk, institutions, and market structure differ. The deeper lesson is convergence: communications resilience is becoming a shared public-safety discipline. It requires infrastructure investment, emergency planning, operational access, public alerting, targeted public support, and continuous learning.
Canada illustrates both the difficulty and the opportunity. Its vast geography, remote and Indigenous communities, severe weather, and federal structure make resilience unusually demanding. Canada also has strengths worth studying: facilities-based network investment, national public alerting, emergency roaming and mutual assistance commitments, and coordination forums such as the Canadian Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (CSTAC) and its Canadian Telecommunications Emergency Preparedness and Management subgroup, which bring government and telecommunications emergency-preparedness professionals together (Jiang, Rowsell & Schmidt, 2025). The Canadian case also shows why resilience requires more than technical reliability: it depends on governance, coordination, operational access, and targeted public support where the benefits extend across whole communities (Howell, 2025).
Three priorities follow.
First, telecom resilience policy should be organized around prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. Regulators should ask whether rules support backup power, route diversity, deployable assets, public alerting, emergency exercises, restoration planning, and after-action learning.
Second, governments should build standing coordination with operators and other critical infrastructure sectors before disasters occur. Network restoration depends on roads, power, fuel, emergency operations centres, and local access decisions. Those relationships cannot be improvised at the edge of a crisis.
Third, public policy should support targeted resilience measures where benefits extend across whole communities. Private investment remains foundational. But resilience also protects emergency services, other critical infrastructure, local economies, and public safety. Where those benefits exceed what any one provider can capture, public funding, subsidies, and shared resilience programs have a legitimate role.
AI will make this agenda more urgent. Better mapping, forecasting, alerting, and situational awareness can improve emergency management, but their value depends on resilient communications networks that remain available under stress.
The future of telecom resilience will be measured by more than uptime. It will be measured by whether networks help people, responders, and governments act quickly when conditions are at their worst.
Shanghai Forum Explores Emerging Debates in International AI Governance and Strategy
by Yu-li Liu, Distinguished Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Shanghai University, ITS Board member
On November 14, 2025, scholars and practitioners gathered in Shanghai for the AI International Governance and Strategy Forum hosted by the School of Journalism and Communication at Shanghai University and the International Intelligent Communication Governance and Strategy Research Center. The forum brought together leading experts from China and Singapore to examine major challenges surrounding AI governance, ethics, security, and strategic communication in an increasingly interconnected world.
Yu-li Liu, Distinguished Professor at Shanghai University and Director of the International Intelligent Communication Governance and Strategy Research Center, opened the forum by outlining three major AI governance approaches represented by the European Union, the United States, and China. She emphasized the growing importance of developing effective and responsible governance frameworks that balance technological innovation with safety, accountability, and public trust.
Several keynote presentations explored the rapidly evolving global AI landscape from legal, ethical, communication, and policy perspectives.
Penghwa Ang, Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, examined geopolitical tensions shaping global AI governance and warned that existing AI ethics frameworks and governance guidelines are increasingly facing a crisis of “governance failure.”
Jiayin Lu, Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China, analyzed structural imbalances in international AI governance, highlighting the tensions among state power, market forces, and social interests within current policy frameworks.
Changfeng Chen, Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, discussed how generative AI systems are reshaping visibility, trust, and public discourse through mechanisms of data retrieval, ranking, and recommendation. This raises important questions about governance that prioritizes the public interest.
Benqian Li, Dean of the Institute of Intelligent Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, examined the rapid advancement of generative AI, highlighting breakthroughs in human-machine co-creation while addressing growing concerns over misinformation, data security, algorithmic bias, copyright disputes, and AI governance frameworks.
Hu Wang, Chairman of the Department of Intelligent Communication at Shanghai University, argued that intelligent communication and AI governance are experiencing four major shifts: in concepts, technologies, scope, and practice. These transformations are collectively reshaping the evolution and future trajectory of global AI governance.
Xu Yao, Secretary-General of the Global AI Innovation Governance Center, discussed emerging challenges in global AI governance, including technological fragmentation and unequal rule-making power, while emphasizing international cooperation, inclusive coordination, and capacity building to promote a more open and equitable global AI governance system.
The forum demonstrated the increasingly central role of communication scholars in shaping global AI governance debates. Discussions underscored that issues such as trust, visibility, ethics, and misinformation are not only technological concerns but also critical communication challenges that require interdisciplinary dialogue and international collaboration.