Last week, colleagues of mine at FAI spoke on The Frontier about some of the latest breakthroughs in quantum computing and their implications. The advancements of quantum technologies are rapidly transitioning from long-term research projects into deployable applications that impact our economic and strategic environment.

I believe this to be true, which is why last year I co-authored a four-part series with my FAI colleague, Dr. Prineha Narang, which you can read here. But there are a few recent events that illustrate the rapidity of improvements in quantum technologies, which should elicit the attention of researchers, investors, and policymakers to ensure U.S. quantum leadership.

The first examples of this phenomenon is how widely-used cryptography may be under threat far sooner than anticipated. Since February, there have been three announcements from quantum researchers worth examining.

Last week, Google Quantum AI published a whitepaper demonstrating that an optimized implementation of Shor’s algorithm could break the 256-bit Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem. Practically, the operation described could enable a machine to penetrate the cryptographic backbone of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and virtually every major blockchain using fewer than 1,200 logical qubits and under 500,000 physical qubits, roughly a tenfold reduction from previous estimates. Under certain conditions, the attack could execute in approximately nine minutes, within Bitcoin’s average block confirmation window, the time it takes to add a new block to the chain, allowing an attacker to intercept a transaction in progress.

Complementing these findings, researchers from CalTech published a similar result, finding that advances in quantum algorithms and circuit design introduce significant efficiencies and computational improvements that could enable a break of widely used encryption with as few as 10,000 to 26,000 physical qubits. This would represent a step-change from prior estimates in the hundreds of thousands. Researchers working in tandem with the startup Oratomic demonstrated that ultra-efficient error correction using neutral-atom qubits could reduce overhead by more than a hundredfold. Simply, this means creating a fault-tolerant machine capable of running Shor’s algorithm could be operational by the end of the decade.

And earlier this year, Iceberg Quantum unveiled Pinnacle, a fault-tolerant architecture that reduces error-correction overhead by an order of magnitude, demonstrating that breaking RSA-2048 could be achieved with fewer than one hundred thousand physical qubits, not the millions previously assumed. Iceberg is already partnering with PsiQuantum, Diraq, and IonQ, each of which projects building systems at that scale within three to five years. Taken together, the Iceberg, Google, and Caltech results are challenging the assumption that the promises of quantum technologies were still decades away.

The second example are the recent reports that the CIA deployed a classified quantum sensing system known as “Ghost Murmur” to locate a downed American F-15E airman in the mountains of southern Iran. The system, reportedly developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, uses advanced quantum sensors to detect the faint electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat from tens of miles away, then pairs that data with AI software to isolate it from background noise. The pilot’s heartbeat essentially became a transponder in the desert.

These developments share a common lesson: quantum technology is advancing faster than previously assumed. In one case, the technology threatens the cryptographic foundations of the digital economy. In the other, it underlies a life-saving tool on the battlefield. The Genesis Mission, investments from the Department of Commerce, DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, and the National Quantum Initiative re-authorization signal that Washington recognizes the stakes of this technological advancement. But executive orders and benchmarking programs alone are insufficient without a sustained, granular policy architecture to back them up.

FAI’s Quantum Policy Playbook seeks to fill that gap. Submissions will translate strategic ambition into concrete, actionable policy proposals that accelerate American quantum research, harden domestic supply chains, expand the technical workforce, and ensure that the United States doesn’t only invent this technology but manufactures, deploys, and leads with it.

If interested, please submit a proposal no later than April 30, here.

In order to learn a new skill or develop expertise in a particular area, one must be exposed to certain types of data. In the context of developing artificial intelligence models, training data is the foundational layer of information which it relies on. The more high quality data that is available and used throughout training, the more capable and adaptable the model is across a suite of tasks.

Last week, FAI published The Data Crunch: Accelerating American AI through Government Data Access. The paper describes the importance of strengthening the data commons, a term that describes freely available and accessible data that can be used to train and improve AI models, specifically by making U.S. government data more accessible.

For the past few years, policymakers in Washington have focused most of their attention on policies that impact access to compute. Examples include but are not limited to the CHIPS and Science Act, the Biden Administration’s diffusion rule (now rescinded), Pax Silica, and the Chip Security Act. The focus on this particular input makes sense, because without this cutting-edge hardware, US firms would not be able to build and deploy AI.

But this does not mean that policymakers should neglect other key inputs, particularly data. The moment to enable more access to data is now for two key reasons.

First, the availability of unused, high quality data available on the open web is increasingly scarce. After a few years of training runs and model improvements, data that could provide a step-change in performance is unlikely to be surfaced by re-scraping the available web. There is plenty of data “out there”, but there are barriers to accessing such data, whether that be it is not digitized, it is unstructured, or there is another friction that raises the cost of acquisition.

Second, the deluge of copyright and intellectual property litigation by rightsholders against model developers continues to raise the risks of using copyrighted data under the presumption that such use qualifies as fair use. While a few decisions point to less-than-apocalyptic outcomes for model developers, more than seventy cases are still outstanding. Adding to the uncertainty, just last week Disney and OpenAI severed ties, dissolving the largest deal between an incumbent IP holder and frontier lab over the use of its products to support image and video generation capabilities. The divide between developers and the content industry seems to be widening by the day.

To address these twin problems, our paper proposes leveraging the significant troves of public data and existing federal authority to create the U.S. Data Accelerator. We identify four types of data that would be ideal starting points for the accelerator. They are:

1. Geological & Geospatial Data

2. Economic Development and Industrial Capacity Data

3. Regulatory Cost Data

4. Medical Device and Drug Trial Data

The types of data we identify have two things in common.

1. The data is already being collected by a federal agency and is made available in some form.

2. These types of data complement current capabilities of generative AI models and therefore could enable greater model utility and customization.

The Accelerator is key to unlocking this data because existing platforms for accessing such data are outdated and fit for a different time. Currently, Data.gov is home to more than 360,000 datasets, but due to the fragmentation of different agencies’ data, lack of regular updates, and heterogeneity in metadata and structure its usability for model development is limited. These deficiencies introduce frictions that limit the utility and usability of this data for model developers. Ideally, by establishing a clear, standardized schema and cadence for making such data available the Accelerator can ensure that this data can be used to the fullest extent.

Luckily, there is existing law and policy on the books that legislators and executive branch officials can rely on to advance this idea. The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 sought to improve federal data access and standardization. Simply put, this law requires agencies to make government data “open by default”, and includes specific expectations for government data assets. This creates the statutory foundation for federal data collection and dissemination to the public. The Office of Management and Budget could issue a memorandum under the powers this legislation vests in it to establish guidance for federal agencies to make publicly available data AI-ready. The Department of Commerce published a report in 2025 on steps taken to ensure publicly available data can support generative AI development and deployment. The insights found within this report could serve as a starting point for future guidance.

Even if there are gaps in this approach, there are willing partners within the legislature and the executive branch who stand ready to help.

On the congressional side, Senator Ted Budd (R-NC) and Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) have introduced legislation to ensure that federal data can be accessible and useful for AI model development. Their legislation would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology to collaborate with other relevant agencies and stakeholders to develop standardized schema to maximize the accessibility and utility of public data.

Turning to the executive branch, President Trump’s recently-released National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence recognizes the value of government data for model development. In Section V, the framework directs Congress to “provide resources to make federal datasets accessible to industry and academia in AI-ready formats for use in training AI models and systems.” Such language is unambiguous: federal datasets can and should be made accessible to accelerate American AI development.

The U.S. Data Accelerator is about enabling “American Innovation,” but it is also about “Innovating America.” Making more high-quality data available for model developers can support further scaling of existing model architectures and firms, while also creating opportunities for new firms or developers. Strengthening the data commons will help firms of all sizes, but particularly startups and new entrants. Such a project can fuel America’s entrepreneurial engine. But this project can also demonstrate the government’s ability to be an enabler of innovation by provisioning a public benefit. With the legal frameworks and raw resources clearly identified, the next step is building the capacity and will to execute.

While the Department of War’s (DoW) fallout with Anthropic dominates headlines, in the annals of the Pentagon, a far less sexy and far more symbiotic relationship with tech companies hums along. IT modernization may not sound consequential or impressive, but migrating to and managing systems in the cloud is no small feat. Enter the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program, a part-voluntary, part-mandated cloud acquisition facilitator for the armed services, combatant commands, and sundry DoW agencies.

In 2022, JWCC improved upon its politicized, years-behind-expectation predecessor by opening up its $9 billion in contracts to four vendors instead of just one. Drawing inspiration from a similar platform that the CIA stood up in 2020 for the intelligence community, JWCC allows each cloud service provider (CSP) to bid on each contract, rather than a single winner-take-all mega-contract. JWCC doesn’t just centralize cloud contracts, though, it also offers a more centralized strategy for managing, moving, and using data.

A key component of that strategy involves cloud interoperability and portability. That is, JWCC’s overseeing office aims to have data flow across providers without unreasonable latency (i.e. lag), to have applications translate well across cloud environments, and to structure data and applications so they can permanently migrate off their current cloud. Cloud interoperability and portability have proven to be a bit of a white whale: for the last few years, regulators and industry watchers have routinely pushed CSPs to seamlessly harmonize their cloud architectures. While some progress has been made, complete interoperability is next to impossible. Given that, JWCC stands out. And it’s not just its approach to interoperability that’s notable. If the saga with Anthropic is a masterclass in what not to do as an agency, then JWCC offers lessons in multi-cloud provision, in government procurement, and in government efficiency.

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Lesson #1: Multi-Cloud Interoperability Demands Personal Responsibility

American bureaucracy is not where one expects to learn a lesson in personal responsibility. But this is exactly what distinguishes JWCC’s approach to multi-cloud provision. The architects of JWCC understood that interoperability is the customer’s responsibility as much as it is the cloud providers’ and that no amount of regulation or standardization can save a cloud customer from poorly navigating a path-dependent market.

JWCC has been tasked with some tall orders. To start, it must coordinate a tangled morass of multi-cloud platforms among the armed services. While an increasing number of those contracts are funneled through JWCC and branches signal interest in collaborating, combating territorialism among military branches is always an uphill battle. JWCC also has the seemingly impossible task of establishing edge computing in austere environments, managing what may well be the most global IT system in the world, and establishing all-domain warfare capabilities that demand data-sharing across branches, allies, and clouds.

Previously, thousands of contracts scattered across the vast sprawl of the military debilitated purchasing power and thoughtful cloud management. That’s why JWCC’s governing body, known as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), doesn’t just help secure the best contract for offices and services within DoW. DISA also serves as a sherpa for agencies in their cloud journey, advising customers on which products have best served others with similar needs in the past and developing custom IT tools that enable efficient cloud adoption.

Likewise, the DoW’s continuous Authorization to Operate, which began around the same time as JWCC and relies on its centralization, speeds software deployment by shifting from one-time approvals to continuous risk monitoring. This streamlines clearing the necessary extra hurdles for handling sensitive data—a win for efficiency and security.

Little of that success translates to private sector cloud operations. Even so, industry, and indeed regulators, have something to learn from JWCC’s clear-eyed approach to massive, indefinite multi-cloud provision.

First, the cloud is a living being, not an invisible building. Too often, enterprises treat the cloud as a static data container. DISA understands that each cloud provider, and public cloud itself, has a time and a place. For example, public cloud is not very valuable when you have a great deal of highly consistent traffic that needs to travel thousands of miles with low latency (think livestreams of military installations or continuous streams of classified reports). In such instances, it may be wise to switch to private cloud or to move data away from cloud’s compute-and-storage-rental model back to in-house hardware, a model known as on-premises. This is why, in addition to creating a private cloud, DISA has modernized on-premises outfits, has accelerated development and simplified cloud management regardless of CSP, and is building a cloud mesh to bypass idiosyncrasies and improve cross-system data sharing.

Accommodating DoW’s wide variety of agencies and services forces DISA to build more agilely, lending flexibility when a customer’s cloud needs change. Especially for large enterprises that, like the DoW, have varied and indefinite cloud needs, this strategy makes awarding cloud contracts more like renewing a lease and less like restructuring your mortgage.

Second, contracting out essential IT services is always a calculated risk. Vendor lock-in is the downside of best-in-class tools, some of which are proprietary to a single CSP. If interoperability is to be a worthy goal, it cannot mean relying only on uncustomized, open-source tools. The least common denominator is the least cutting-edge offering. If we think of interoperability and portability as essentially supply chain optionality—how many vendors can provision a tool and how well it will work with tools elsewhere in the stack—it becomes clear how idolizing these concepts stifles innovation. Just think of where critical infrastructure would be if we demanded every component have a dozen potential suppliers.

So then, desirable interoperability must mean weighing the benefit of a proprietary tool with the reality of being locked in to a vendor. As the deputy CTO in charge of JWCC put it, the expectation that you can pick “this piece of a cloud and this piece of another and then jam them together is…a fallacy.” The ability to be cloud agnostic, to be in one cloud on Monday, another on Tuesday, or simultaneously in both by Wednesday, relies on DoW’s ability to modernize apps such that they are as portable as possible.

Perfect cloud agnosticism just doesn’t exist. If complete off-the-shelf interoperability is possible (which it likely isn’t), we are years away from it, regardless of the regulatory state or industry standards. Relying on an outside contractor to provide a critical service requires doing the heavy lifting beforehand to ensure apps and data can migrate elsewhere should the time come. It also requires recognizing that life in the cloud isn’t frictionless, a lesson that rings all the truer in classified environments where some of the greatest obstacles to interoperability—identity and access management and security—are all the harder.

Many seem to presume the burden of interoperability falls solely on cloud providers, who avoid it in an anti-competitive attempt to entrench themselves in the IT infrastructure of their customers. While standards may facilitate interoperability, we cannot forget the role that personal responsibility plays in setting yourself up for success.

Lesson #2: In Government Procurement, Purchasing Power and Continuous Contracts Encourage Competitive Cooperation

A thoughtful approach to multi-cloud procurement isn’t the only thing working in JWCC’s favor. Its massive purchasing power also contributes to its relative agility. In the first 18 months of contract awarding, JWCC inked $1 billion in contracts, instantly ranking it on par with cloud vendors’ biggest customers. In the 12 months that followed, it awarded $2 billion more. Egress fees are a good example of this purchasing power leverage at work. JWCC negotiated baseline discounts ranging from 35 to 100 percent for data egress, upon which further discounts can be offered for particular task orders.

JWCC’s steady stream of lucrative contracts encourages CSPs to create interoperable solutions. This may seem counterintuitive, as CSPs participate in a prisoner’s dilemma-type game where interoperability makes winning future contracts easier regardless of existing infrastructure, but each CSP benefits from locking in customers to their cloud by using proprietary tech and mutually unintelligible semantics. However, this is an infinitely repetitive prisoner’s dilemma, in which there are near infinite rounds of contracts. In this scenario, game theory suggests that CSPs will cooperate with each other, making their systems as interoperable with one another as possible so that everyone plays nice in the sandbox. (Cue John Nash telling his buddies not to all go after the blonde in A Beautiful Mind). All the while, third-party providers, which JWCC looks to increase in its next version of the program, are incentivized to create seamless migration across CSPs for a particular app or program.

This cooperative strategy assumes some things about the way the repeated contract bid game is set up. First, it assumes that for any given contract, CSPs can either cooperate by making their service as interoperable as technically feasible, or they can defect by purposefully making the service less than optimally interoperable. For instance, if a customer seeks a contract for a customized tool that would function best using proprietary technology, the winning CSP is not “defecting” if technical hurdles prevent seamless interoperability with other CSPs. Rather, the provider only defects if it purposefully obstructs interoperability.

This leads to the second assumption: all losing providers must be able to detect whether the winning CSP has cooperated or defected, and all losers will calibrate their strategy the next round based on the winner’s strategy this round. Lastly, it assumes the payoff for the current contract round is not so astronomically high compared to the payoff of future task orders that it nullifies the incentive to continue cooperating. If CSPs expect this round’s contract to be worth more than the present value of all future contracts, the cooperative strategy no longer makes sense.

In truth, these assumptions don’t perfectly reflect hyperscalers’ cloud provision for JWCC customers, but they hold sufficiently to encourage greater cooperation. The first assumption obviously holds. In fact, the defect strategy of making services purposefully less interoperable is the strategy regulators presume hyperscalers adopt in the broader market. The second assumption is trickier. JWCC contracts are negotiated, not open. At most, the government only has to reveal how much the total award amount is and explain why the losers lost. Even if later interactions with the winner’s systems make obvious a previous defection, the time lag doesn’t allow for direct retaliation against the defecting winner; it only harbors regret that you yourself are not defecting more often.

Unlike in traditional prisoner’s dilemma games, however, this one has a game master. If a CSP defects, the probability of winning future contracts diminishes. Its unnecessarily poor interoperability may “lock in” future contracts that touch specific systems, but it has tarnished its broader reputation. JWCC negotiators act as third- party arbitrators or mediators, both of which lead to greater cooperation. As for the last assumption, a rational actor has no reason to believe that future contracts won’t be just as lucrative as the present one. Winning big now in a way that locks in large future contracts is still shortsighted in light of the potentially bigger contracts from which you’ve now practically disqualified yourself.

Realistically, JWCC is not a perfect game master. As its financial operations metrics improve, it will be better positioned to sniff out the runaway costs that vendor lock-in can cause, but for now its ability to detect defection probably leaves something to be desired. What’s more, JWCC contract officers may have short memories or turn a blind eye to defection if the service quality is otherwise exceptional. On the whole, however, JWCC’s pooled purchasing power and iterative multi-vendor contract awarding encourage hyperscalers to cooperate so that they can maintain a good reputation for future contracts and benefit from the cooperation of others. Government agencies have something to learn here—in procurement, sometimes, it pays to keep paying.

Lesson #3: There’s a Right Way to Think about Efficiency

To say JWCC is successful is to imply it is more “efficient” than the system it replaced. That word has gotten a lot of attention from policy wonks lately. Between DOGE’s bureaucratic warpath and the breakout success of the Abundance movement, 2025 was the year when both the right and the left began reimagining what our government could do, if only it were more efficient. At the crux of this imaginative project is how exactly to define efficiency. JWCC is a good example of what American bureaucratic efficiency should look like precisely because it doesn’t aim to be as efficient as possible.

First, in the pursuit of resilience, JWCC accepts redundancy. One could argue that the entire military operating off a single cloud provider would be the most efficient in that it is the only way to ensure complete interoperability, but this is one of many reasons its predecessor program failed. Procuring from a single vendor may streamline things, but it also fosters mediocrity and vulnerability, whereas real efficiency is durable and versatile.

Imagine a race car capable of hitting 275 mph, significantly faster than the top speed on most NASCAR tracks. If hitting 275 causes it to overheat or break down, it would come in dead last every time. Similarly, if you build such a vehicle as cheaply as possible, its versatility is limited. There’s a reason an F1 car is wildly more expensive than a NASCAR stock model—the latter can only handle oval tracks with banked turns, the former can turn on a dime. The car best suited to its aim is the most efficient, even if it takes longer to build or costs more.

Second, JWCC entices, rather than manipulates, private companies’ participation. JWCC invites companies to compete in a way that serves the public interest without attaching political prerequisites or changing the conditions to participate partway through the process. When unelected officials’ administrative capacity is so great that it can pursue its own political ends, we’re in trouble. Perhaps this is what prominent mid-20th century liberal Senator Eugene McCarthy meant when he said, “An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.”

Not only is this type of efficiency anathema to our democratic republic, it also isn’t efficient in the long run. If bureaucratic directives at the behest of the sitting executive are a hyper-efficient way to enact a political agenda, they are also imminently reversible.

In the modern whirlwind of extra-congressional action, bureaucrats marshaled by the last three presidents have changed everything from environmental goals to immigration policy to student loan forgiveness programs, only to have them changed back again roughly four years later. Those of us who have closely watched the disbursement of money (or lack thereof) under the BEAD Act are intimately familiar with the inefficiency of executive tampering. In 2024, a landmark Supreme Court decision overturned a longstanding precedent known as Chevron deference. In effect, this deference encouraged agencies to interpret their mandate according to their own political preferences and the sitting executive’s agenda. Its overturning all but guarantees bureaucratic delays as Congress further clarifies and updates statutes. Yet the Court’s decision also exhorts Congress, rather than unelected federal agencies, to steward the programs it has enacted and the taxpayer money with which it has been entrusted. This improves long-term efficiency: careening the ship side to side prevents it from moving forward. Efficiency demands having a clear mandate and sticking to it.

JWCC, then, is a successful government program not because it worships efficiency at the expense of innovation or resilience, nor because it uses its lucrative contracts to entangle companies in ongoing political fights. It is successful because it is clear eyed enough to know it can’t outsource project stewardship to contractors, it’s big enough not to get bullied by major corporations, and it is insulated enough from political meddling both within the Pentagon and at the White House.

Waging war in Iran and at domestic tech companies leaves little time for introspection, but the DoW would be well served by reflecting on its own success as it prepares to announce a JWCC Next, JWCC’s successor. It would seem many of the lessons JWCC offers have yet to fully sink in, even within the Pentagon.

If online chatter is any indication, egress fees are the boogeyman of compute, the bane of competition. These fees have come under scrutiny from regulators the world over, not least of which because there’s often a charge to move data to a competitor or back into your own on-premises IT infrastructure. While providers vary in their data transfer pricing, egress occurs any time data is sent around the world, transferred to different parts of the cloud, pulled to an external location, or summoned by an external IP address. Egress fees, to the lament of regulators, are multiples more expensive among the largest three cloud service providers (CSP), the hyperscalers of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

But the panic makes a mountain out of a molehill. Egress fees distract from more earnest and harder to resolve industry issues, like interoperability, hyperscalers’ cross-market advantages, and inflated license fees for SaaS offerings on other providers’ platforms. Here, we outline a reproach of common regulatory proposals against egress fees, particularly those offered by the EU Data Act and the various European market studies that informed it.

Not All Egress Fees Are Made Equal: The Case Against the Outright Ban

Though invisible, data is heavy, at least when pushing massive amounts of it around. Egress fees are a way to make the businesses that take up the most bandwidth internalize the cost to the overall system. Should egress fees be outright banned, that cost would be redistributed among all customers, including small businesses whose infrequent data transferring is covered under hyperscalers’ “free tier.” In fact, over 90% of AWS customers pay nothing in egress fees. Yes, the egress bill of a video streaming company is expensive and confusing, but that’s the tradeoff for quality scalability.

Egress fees are also a way for some CSPs to signal that their comparative advantage lies in compute and storage rather than data transfer. In fact, one might reasonably argue that they advance competition by allowing smaller competitors and adjacent industries to capitalize on more efficient, less energy-intensive ways to move data. If an enterprise does not like its egress costs, it can use companies like Alluxio or Snowflake to compress files or cache the most commonly used data locally, drastically reducing egress costs while expanding the cloud industry ecosystem. Or an enterprise can choose to bypass the internet when transferring data, thereby taking advantage of the public cloud without draining shared resources by constantly retrieving data stored on the internet. In either case, egress fees encourage the biggest cloud customers to better steward their data in a way that keeps cost lower for the majority.

The Practical Difficulties of Exempting Fees When Switching to a Competitor

But what if an enterprise wants to leave its current provider by returning to on-premises or by opting for a smaller CSP that displaces egress costs elsewhere in its pricing structure? Making the bandwidth hogs internalize costs is one thing, but holding companies’ data hostage when they try to exit your service is practically the definition of anti-competitive. While this line of thinking produces more targeted regulation, it’s misguided. A study prepared for the European Commission found that the egress costs for fictitious customers to transfer out of all their data over the public internet amounted to less than half a percent of their annual cloud services cost. Even if eliminating egress fees did lower total switching costs, there remains the difficulty of distinguishing when a customer is switching to a competitor rather than transferring data as a normal course of business.

To comply with the EU Data Act, the hyperscalers now allow customers to apply for fee waivers on one-time data transfers to other providers or on-premises systems, so long as the customer removes all data and workloads. Google also suggests European customers “may be eligible” for free transfers to proven multi-cloud partners.

The 60 (Google and Microsoft) to 90 day (AWS) complete removal required for the waiver is not only a tight turnaround that could compromise security during migration, but is also completely out of touch with the market. Eighty to ninety percent of public cloud users operate on two or more providers. Assuming Google sets a standard in discerning when data transfers are phased exits from Google’s service and when they are egress typical of multi-cloud architecture, this still distracts from a larger concern.

The more scrupulous CSPs are in determining which data transfers qualify, the more valueless these fee waivers are and the more complaints regulators will get that they’ve not gone far enough in preventing vendor lock-in. The more generous CSPs are in granting waivers, the more these exemptions resemble an outright elimination of egress fees, with all the market inefficiencies and harm to smaller cloud customers that brings.

Offering Data Transfer at Cost Hurts Innovation

The EU Data Act mandates egress charges associated with multi-cloud use not exceed the cost incurred by CSPs. It further stipulates one-time data transfers be offered at cost for the next three years as a transition before eliminating all provider-switching related egress fees. Insofar as this attempts to appear more measured than a full ban, it is all the more nonsensical. The average company saves over 200% by using Infrastructure as a Service from cloud providers. This savings is closer to 270% for start ups and smaller companies, who have long been noted as the primary beneficiaries of the cloud’s offerings. The cloud is not without downsides, but its services greatly benefit customers. Free market societies encourage innovation by allowing service providers to compete and to profit from that competition. We eliminate all incentive for providers to differentiate products and improve services when we prevent profit. There is only an arbitrary difference in making CSPs offer data transfer at cost and asking them to offer compute or storage at cost. In fact, if the aim is to improve consumer welfare, there is no point in stopping at egress fees when, for even the most data-intensive cloud customers, they constitute just 6% of total cloud spending.

What’s more, AWS has passed on over 100% of the drop in egress costs over the last several years, meaning it has lowered prices slightly more than the cost of transferring data has decreased. Sure, it up-charges egress costs more than its competitors, but it is, after all, a business. Businesses that overcharge lose market share, which AWS has, albeit slowly, over the last few years.

Sticky But Not Stuck

The inconvenient truth for regulators is that even in an idealized, highly competitive cloud market, cloud provision is sticky, meaning that the very nature of the service being offered makes customers unlikely to switch often. Cloud providers are more like landlords than they are like cereal brands. You’ll probably swap Rice Krispies for Cheerios if the price of the former shoots up, but you may choose not to move even if your rent rises. It’s just too darn annoying. As one economic study found, 90% of cloud customers did not adopt a cheaper, exact replica product offered by the same provider even though it would have saved customers 22% of their total cloud spending. If customers refuse to switch to perfect substitutes offered by the same provider, where interoperability and data portability are nonissues, this tells us the market is simply inelastic. Before regulating allegedly anti-competitive practices, we need to consider how the nature of the market shapes customer preferences. Granted, a demand-inelastic market does naturally allow for greater abuse on the part of cloud providers. Luckily, the cloud is a commercial product, not a public service.

Public Cloud, Not Public Service

Cloud service providers are profit-maximizing companies whose main customers are other profit-maximizing companies. Everyday consumers interact with the cloud either through their workplace or indirectly when, say, watching a Netflix show or ordering GrubHub, without realizing their systems run on AWS. You may have many subscription services, but renting compute and storage is likely not one of them. This makes the cloud different from other digital services coming under scrutiny, like Apple’s walled garden or Google’s advertising empire, in that neither individual consumers nor small businesses are adversely affected by the practices of digital service giants. Anti-competitive practices don’t have to target the little guy in order to be sub-optimal, but don’t let regulators tug at your heartstrings on this one: in this arena, there is no David, only Goliaths.

On December 11, 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a bold new effort to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. It would be incubated within Twitter, but the ultimate goal of the project would be to “allow [Twitter] to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and [force Twitter] to be far more innovative than in the past.” He named it Bluesky.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Bluesky was spun off and eventually launched an app of the same name. Early growth was healthy but manageable, driven largely by invitations. Friends invited friends; nerdy techies made up a large percentage of the early commentariat. Many were Twitter expatriots fed up with Musk’s management of their beloved social media platform—an echo of earlier decampments on the right, when those unhappy with the Dorsey regime fled to Parler and Gab. The sharp politicization of X during the 2024 election, however, led to a tipping point: whereas the right-wing networks had peaked around 2 to 4 million active users, Bluesky exploded to over 42 million. Suddenly, social media had balkanized: X was for right-wingers, and Bluesky had become Lib Twitter.

Now, many are starting to ask questions about Bluesky. Is the platform really an idealized version of X for the liberal intelligentsia, where science and facts get their due? Is the balkanization of social media actually a good thing for democracy? With Trump Derangement Syndrome running rampant, is Bluesky trapped in a doom loop of its own making?

But all these questions miss the forest for the trees. Its real significance lies in its architecture and ethos of openness. By building a platform where control is distributed—across users, algorithms, and servers—Bluesky offers a vision of social media that isn’t beholden to any single corporation or ideology. It has the potential to deliver something rare in today’s tech arena: user empowerment. But to get there, the platform will need to expand its network, welcome a broader public, and encourage outside innovation. If Bluesky succeeds, it won’t just be another Twitter clone; it could redefine how we connect and communicate on the internet.

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The X-odus

Bluesky’s genesis can be traced directly to Dorsey’s acknowledgement of Twitter’s failures: he saw that Twitter had become too centralized and vulnerable to corporate and government control. To get Twitter back to its roots as an open, decentralized system, Dorsey founded Bluesky. The idea was bold: instead of letting a single company control the public conversation, build a federated, user-controlled network; recreate Twitter as a protocol—a set of open standards that anyone can use and build off of—rather than as a closed platform.

In 2021, Twitter’s leadership brought on Jay Graber as CEO to spearhead the effort. The small but scrappy Bluesky team worked on building what would eventually become the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol: the underlying architecture designed to enable a federated social web.

At its core, the AT Protocol establishes a standard format for identity, follows, and social data, allowing different apps and servers to interoperate​. In practical terms, this means a user could move their account from one server to another without losing their followers or content​. It also means no single provider owns your social identity. “There’s no one company that can decide what gets published; instead there is a marketplace of companies deciding what to carry to their audiences,” Bluesky explained. In other words, the network is meant to be decentralized by design: many independently operated communities connected by a common protocol, much like email. Users, not corporations, ultimately hold the reins.

All of this was going on behind the scenes at Twitter, with the goal of eventually integrating Twitter into the AT Protocol as its first client. Then Elon happened.

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in late 2022 marked a dramatic shift for the platform, as he sought to reduce excessive content moderation and restore what he saw as a commitment to free speech. His changes—including reinstating some banned accounts, overhauling Twitter’s verification system, altering content moderation and curation policies, and restructuring the company’s workforce—were intended to make the platform more open and financially sustainable. Twitter also jettisoned the Bluesky team.

As fate would have it, the chaos happening in San Francisco turned out to be a blessing. The Bluesky team kept working on achieving its mission of creating a decentralized social media protocol as an independent organization. In its early days, the platform was tiny and exclusive—essentially a techie salon for those with invite codes. This closed beta phase beginning in early 2023 helped refine the technology, but it also shaped public perception: from the outside, Bluesky looked like an elitist clubhouse of techy cognoscenti. As one commentator quipped, Bluesky was little more than an “invite-only clone of Twitter” that was more “like a country club … where you can go and be with your [techie] peers.”

Bluesky opened to the public in February 2024 and grew to a few million users over the next few months. Then, in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, daily usage saw hockey stick growth as the app went from approximately 3 million to 30 million users overnight. People fleeing Musk’s X—primarily people with a progressive-liberal bent revolted by Elon Musk’s close relationship with President Trump—flocked to Bluesky in what has become known as the “X-odus.”

Celebrities, politicians, and the chronically online rushed to claim their usernames on Bluesky, lending the new social network an aura of being the next big thing. Given that most of these new users’ only commonality was a hatred of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, it was natural that the Bluesky discourse trended heavily toward anti-MAGA politics, shaping public perceptions of it as a progressive sanctuary rather than the more ideologically diverse network it aimed to become. High-profile progressive users including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, George Takei, Kara Swisher, and Bryan Tyler Cowen were influential in defining the discourse. It is no coincidence that The Lincoln Project, a vehemently anti-Trump political group, is one of the most followed Bluesky accounts.

This was partly by design: Bluesky’s content moderation approach is far more proactive than Musk’s laissez-faire ethos on X. The Bluesky app launched with robust tools to help users curate their experience with features like community block lists, content labels, and customizable feed algorithms​. Users could even subscribe to shared block lists to automatically mute entire groups (one popular block list targets accounts labeled as “MAGA supporters” en masse)​. However, this also reinforced the Lib Twitter label. The federated model was not yet fully in effect—most users were all in one big community—so if that community leaned liberal, there was no easy on-boarding of right-leaning or nonpolitical groups elsewhere.

Amid this hype, Bluesky’s deeper mission has been obscured. Fundamentally, the project has always been about building an open, federated social media ecosystem where users control their data and communities set their own rules. Indicative of this mission is Bluesky’s unofficial motto, mundus sine caesaribus, which roughly translates to “a world without emperors.”

But high-profile incidents have distracted from this mission. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Jesse Singal Incident.

When Jesse Singal, a self-described liberal journalist known for his opposition to youth gender transition, joined Bluesky, the backlash was immediate. Singal quickly became the most-blocked account on the platform, and a petition circulated urging Bluesky’s leadership to ban him in spite of the fact that he had not broken any platform policies. Deplatforming Singal rapidly turned into a progressive cause célèbre. Ultimately, Bluesky leadership declined to take action, adhering to its principle of user-controlled moderation rather than top-down enforcement. But the incident underscored an important tension. While Bluesky was designed as an open and decentralized network, its early user base was ideologically skewed, and incidents like this demonstrated that it was an inhospitable space for certain viewpoints. In sum, a perfect storm of user migration, moderation philosophy, and early adopter demographics earned Bluesky its reputation as Lib Twitter.

Looking Under the Hood

Despite its politically homogeneous start as Lib Twitter, Bluesky’s architecture holds the promise of far greater pluralism. The very goal of federation is to enable many communities with different norms and viewpoints to coexist, each operating its own server under the shared network. In theory, Bluesky could host a constellation of diverse forums—conservatives, liberals, centrists, Twilight stans, Catholics, furries, Joe Rogan fans, sadomasochists, etc.—all interoperating through the AT Protocol. Instead of one company’s rules setting the tone (as with Twitter or Facebook), each community can set its own moderation standards. Most importantly, each community is subject to the others’ rules when entering each other’s spaces; no spamming your political enemies.

The key innovation Bluesky is pursuing is algorithmic choice. Unlike traditional social platforms that impose one opaque algorithm on everyone, Bluesky is building a system where users can select (or even build) their own feed algorithms. “We want a future where you control what you see on social media,” CEO Jay Graber wrote. The goal is to enable a “marketplace of algorithms.”​ In practical terms, a Bluesky user might swipe between a purely chronological timeline, a community-curated feed, or an algorithm that downranks “hateful” content. Users’ choice over how their feeds work can be even more granular, switching from their puppy-pictures feed to their hyper-political news feed to their sports-news-only feed and back again in seconds, depending on their preference​.

By giving people this power, Bluesky aims to break the cycle of engagement-driven outrage. If you can opt out of the algorithm that amplifies the loudest and most inflammatory posts, the whole tenor of the online conversation can change. This user-centric approach to curation could foster healthier discourse and more cross-pollination of ideas than the enraging shouting match that characterized the Twitter experience.

Crucially, Bluesky’s decentralized architecture may offer a better path forward than earlier federated projects like Mastodon. Mastodon and the broader Fediverse—shorthand for the “federated universe” of independently hosted, interconnected social platforms and services that communicate via shared protocols—proved that decentralization can work at scale, but they also exposed pitfalls. The Fediverse experience is uneven and confusing for newcomers. For example, Mastodon’s email-like federation often leads to fragmented conversations: two users on different servers might see completely different reply threads on the same post, because each server only shows the replies it knows about​. Bluesky is trying to avoid those pitfalls by designing a more unified network structure on top of federation.

The AT Protocol includes a “Big Graph” service—essentially a network-wide index—to ensure a global view of content and consistent identity across servers​. That means a user on a small community server can still seamlessly follow, reply to, or search posts from the main Bluesky server (or any other server) with the system handling the synchronization behind the scenes. If successful, this model would combine the diversity of decentralization with the convenience of a centralized service. In short, Bluesky is decentralized without feeling disjointed. This could make it a far more compelling alternative to centralized platforms than earlier attempts.

More than merely cloning Twitter’s microblogging, Bluesky’s technology opens up new possibilities for social media innovation. The AT Protocol is open source and intended as a foundation that developers can build on​. From alternative Bluesky clients, to browser extensions that verify identities via domain names​, third-party apps and services have already started to appear built on top of the AT Protocol.

In the future, entirely new social experiences could be constructed atop the network. Imagine an Instagram or YouTube in which content flows through the same decentralized backend, meaning your followers, content, and identity travel with you. Startups could build novel social networking apps that could immediately be part of a larger interoperable social web. Some enthusiasts even talk about integrating Bluesky with other decentralized tech: using cryptocurrency wallets for identity verification or payments or linking Bluesky content with open publishing tools like WordPress. This extensibility hints at Bluesky’s broader significance: it is not a platform, but an ecosystem.

The full potential of an open social protocol will likely be discovered by outsiders tinkering with it in the same spirit that the early open web spawned unexpected innovations. Bluesky’s decentralization isn’t an end in itself; it’s a means to unleash creativity, competition, and diversity in social media.

Getting From X to B

For Bluesky to evolve from Lib Twitter into the open social revolution its founders and early adherents envision, several steps will be crucial. First, it must expand federation in practice and onboard a far more ideologically and globally diverse user base. This means rolling out support for independent servers and making it easy for all kinds of communities to set up their own spaces. Bluesky will need to actively encourage a wider range of groups to join, including moderates, conservatives, international users, and others who didn’t rush in during the X-odus. If federation remains limited, or if most users stay corralled on the one big bsky.social server, Bluesky risks remaining an insular bubble.

The team’s greatest challenge is to balance growth with its values. In practical terms, that could involve developing tools for inter-server moderation so that servers with lax policies don’t overwhelm others with spam. The goal should be to let a thousand communities bloom while maintaining some connective tissue and shared standards across the network for dealing with illegal content.

Second, Bluesky and others need to nurture a developer and enterprise ecosystem around the AT Protocol. Its success will hinge on others embracing it as an open standard. The project has made its code open source and has already seen independent developers craft custom feeds and apps​. This is a promising start, but the momentum must continue. When entrepreneurs have their pick of dozens of social media protocols, the value proposition of building on the AT Protocol must be crystal clear.

Bluesky should facilitate third-party innovation by providing stable APIs, documentation, and perhaps funding or hackathons for building on the protocol. From novel algorithmic feed providers to specialized community servers or moderation tools, independent tools will only enrich the overall network. If companies see opportunity in the AT Protocol, they might build social features into their own products that hook into Bluesky’s network, much like how different email clients and providers all interoperate on the email protocol. Imagine news organizations, universities, or interest groups running their own Bluesky servers for their members, or software companies adopting the protocol for internal social feeds.

Such buy-in won’t happen overnight, but rolling out a welcome mat for outside innovation is essential. This also means Bluesky should prepare for standards governance. Cultivating this kind of open ecosystem will help Bluesky fulfill its role as a public commons rather than just another app.

Finally, Bluesky must figure out a sustainable business model that preserves the platform’s independence and user-centric ethos. As a public benefit corporation, Bluesky has explicitly committed to prioritizing an open and decentralized social web over profit​. That noble stance doesn’t pay the server bills or developer salaries by itself. Thus far, Bluesky has been supported by investor funding and the goodwill of its backers. Long-term, it plans to avoid the advertising model used by traditional social media since locking in user data would contradict the whole premise of user ownership​. The team’s initial revenue experiments have instead focused on paid services that enhance the user experience. For example, Bluesky introduced a paid domain name service that allows users to purchase custom domain handles (e.g., yourname.com) more easily​.

Thousands of users have shown interest in using personal domains as their identity, which both generates revenue and advances the idea of user-controlled identity. This is a start, but additional revenue streams will be needed. Possibilities include premium features, subscription plans for power users, or offering hosting and support for communities that run their own servers (Bluesky-as-a-Service anyone?). Ironically, a good example on how to do that is Elon Musk’s re-commercialization of Twitter in this area.

A Bluesky that fulfills its promise could empower communities of all stripes to take charge of their online experience. It could spawn new social apps we can’t yet imagine, all interoperable and user-first by design. And it could demonstrate that decentralization online isn’t just a pipe dream or a playground for geeks, but a viable alternative to the status quo. In an era of disillusionment with social media, Bluesky’s open-at-the-core approach is a refreshing experiment in what the next chapter of the internet might look like​.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be—and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not, or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved.

—Isaac Asimov, My Own View, 1978

Our Goal

When Isaac Asimov published his first piece of science fiction in 1939, he wrote for an analog world; a world without transistors or tupperware. There were no atomic bombs or automatic transmissions. We had yet to discover DNA or duct tape. Throughout his life, Asimov bore witness to many of the fictions he and others envisioned becoming reality. But he also knew that we were only getting started.

We live in an era of progress and incomprehensible change. The course of the last couple of centuries demonstrated that innovation can radically reconfigure geopolitics, economics, and daily life in ways that are not always under our control. Needless to say, as progress continues to escalate, technology presents us with enormous promise but also potential perils. The challenge before us is to continue ever upward without losing our humanity.

Toward this end, Asimov’s call for a “science fictional way of thinking” is not a flight of fancy. It is, in part, a recognition that we cannot approach questions of technology and society solely with the present in mind. A mindset that fails to anticipate technological trajectories risks becoming obsolete before any idea can be implemented. Consider the dilemma posed by the internet: early pioneers of cyberspace saw it as a pure conduit of freedom, liberty, and equality. In the words of John Perry Barlow, the internet was a place “more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” The reality has proven far more complex as the internet has proven a source of liberation for some and a source of oppression for others.

Asimov was right. Change is the dominant factor in society and yesterday’s perception of today almost always proves to be inadequate. At the Foundation for American Innovation, we operationalize that insight by treating science-fictional thinking as a discipline rather than a vibe. To us, science fictional thinking is not daydreaming of alien worlds or lightsabers. It is a process of backcasting from multiple plausible futures to shape today’s policy options. We consider different scenarios to stress-test our assumptions and continuously scan emerging technologies for second-order effects. In short, we take Asimov’s charge to “see the world as it will be” and translate it into concrete strategy so our decisions are resilient to tomorrow’s shocks and expand the frontier for American innovation.

But looking to the future is not sufficient. As Asimov highlights in My Own View and other essays, science fictional thinking requires not only foresight but also hindsight. To him, science fiction is the product of observing the advancement of science and technology and in order to imagine a plethora of futures, as Asimov did, one must have a firm grounding in the past. Technology policy is no different. As a colleague, Robert Bellafiore, has written before, “it is precisely by looking backward that we prepare to move forward, by ‘remembering what had come before’ that we become capable of imagining what may come next.”

Just as the ancient Roman god Janus’ two faces looked both forwards and backwards in order to oversee beginnings, endings, and transitions, we aim to look to both the past and the future. It is only by doing so that we can hope to glean the foresight, imagination, and prudence to meet the challenges of inevitable change.

Our goal, then, is this: to do everything we can to make the future happen sooner.

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Our Work

What we do is to try and approach issues of public policy in a science fictional way of thinking. Much of the DC intelligentsia surrounding technology and telecommunications approaches issues beginning with economics, sociology, or common law. These are all useful lenses from which to approach issues of public policy and many of our colleagues and competitors do incredible work from such a vantage point. Where we differ is that we choose to approach issues of public policy through the lens of technology.

It is for this reason that we spend an inordinate amount of our time learning about technology. We are fortunate enough to have built an extensive network of techies and we are not shy about leaning on their expertise. Whether it is educating ourselves about the organization and development of ancient Roman road systems or conducting cutting edge research on the future of quantum computing, our team starts with the tech.

In analyzing technology, we take the approach that tech and telecomm—which are often thought of in policy circles as distinct from one another—are, in fact, inextricably linked. We consider the full tech stack as one. Platforms, cloud hosts, DNS servers, wireless transmitters, cable lines, and submarine cables all work together to bring us into the digital world and policies that are targeted at one piece of this stack have ripple effects throughout the rest. Therefore, it is a crucial part of our work to think beyond just the piece of tech being discussed but to also consider how that piece interacts with all the rest.

While we start with tech, we don’t stop there. Economics, philosophy, common law, and many other fields are crucial to our work. But in starting with tech, we have the advantage of being able to apply social science and law to tech rather than the other way around. But it would be foolish to not use all the tools at our disposal. If you’re curious about where we’re coming from, just take a glance at our Bookshop.

Our Future

The pace of change is not slowing, and the stakes of getting it wrong are rising. In the years ahead, the frontier will be defined as much by software as by the oftentimes invisible infrastructure of compute, connectivity, chips, and standards that determine what is possible, what is profitable, and what is permissible. Those who treat technology as an exogenous force—something that “happens” and then must be managed after the fact—will find themselves forever reacting to the last disruption. Our bet is that the next era of American strength will belong to the institutions that can see the world as it will be and act early.

That is why this Substack exists. It will be our workshop in public. Some posts will be speculative, structured, evidence-based imagining anchored in what engineers are building now. Others will be more historical, because durable policy is rarely born from amnesia.

The throughline for our work is that innovation is not fate. Technological progress can widen the space of human freedom and national flourishing, but only if it is paired with the imagination to anticipate second-order effects and the prudence to build guardrails without smothering the frontier. We are uninterested in navel-gazing nostalgia and equally uninterested in naïve techno-utopianism. We care about the hard middle. We care about institutional design that lets free societies capture the upside of change while keeping the center of gravity human.

The future will be built by people who can see several moves ahead, who can learn from what came before, and who refuse to outsource tomorrow to accident.

What’s in a Name?

The name of this publication, The Ansible, describes the work we are trying to do: communicate quickly across distance—between disciplines, institutions, and futures—without ignoring the fact that distance exists. The word comes to us from the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. In her novels she first introduced the ansible as a device that allows information to be transmitted instantaneously across space. But the ansible is more than just a gadget, it is a philosophy of connection: the right information sent to the right place at the right time to shape what happens next.

Le Guin never treated the ansible as a trick to make plot problems disappear. In her Hainish Cycle novels, she made it the backbone of an interstellar social architecture. Her cosmos is full of worlds too far apart for physical connection, even at lightspeed. Yet these varying worlds are capable of coordination because information can arrive when it is needed. The ansible enables the Ekumen, a federation that persuades instead of conquering. Communication has become a tool for reciprocity. That intuition—connection without domination—animates our work on technology and public policy. We aim to connect the people who build systems with the people who govern them, bring evidence into rooms where decisions are made, and enable pluralism.

The name also clarifies what we mean by taking on Asimov’s call to a “science-fictional way of thinking.” Science fiction at its best is neither prophecy nor mere entertainment; it is a laboratory for stress-testing assumptions. It allows us to ask how today’s architecture behaves under tomorrow’s loads. That is the method we try to bring to questions of networks, platforms, devices, and public policy.

Extending the Metaphor

The ansible metaphor disciplines our practice in several ways. It reminds us that information can move faster than institutions. Statutes do not change overnight, but ideas and incentives can propagate quickly and change behavior long before the ink dries on a bill. Our job is to compress the distance between insight and implementation. Speed does not excuse sloppiness; it demands clarity, because analysis that arrives late or muddled is indistinguishable from silence.

It also warns us against centralization by convenience. Le Guin’s ansible allows governments and technologists to coordinate without homogenizing. That is a design principle we try to honor in technology policy. When we champion interoperability, open standards, and contestable markets, we are not romanticizing chaos; we are acknowledging that a complex, innovative society stays resilient when no single chokepoint can dictate outcomes. Experimentation at the edge, coupled with accountability for power at the core, is how we ought to govern technology without smothering it.

A third lesson concerns tradeoffs. Even an instantaneous link has limits: bandwidth, context, interpretation. Likewise, modern networks are miracles bounded by physics and incentives. Undersea cables can be cut; satellites can be jammed; software can be hacked; supply chains can be poisoned. If policy pretends that constraints do not exist, it will push systems into failure modes. Starting with engineering humility is not technocracy; it is prudence. From that base we can apply economics and align incentives; we can apply law to protect rights and enforce responsibility; we can apply political theory to keep public institutions sovereign.

The Ansible in Practice

What does this metaphor mean for this publication? First, it is a promise about translation. The ansible in Le Guin’s work connects worlds that would otherwise ignore or talk past one another. Our aim is to do the same across the tech stack and the policy stack. We convene builders and policymakers, operators and scholars, civil society and regulators. We try to get deeply technical without losing legibility, and to get philosophically serious without losing purchase on implementation.

Second, it is a promise about scope. The ansible is a communications device, but in Le Guin’s hands its implications span from physics to diplomacy. So, too, our beat ranges from radio access networks to First Amendment doctrine, from datacenter interconnects to export controls, from privacy engineering to administrative law. Posts will vary in form. Some will be deep dives and some will be short opinions. All will seek to synthesize the complexities of technology and public policy into useful and actionable information.

Third, it is a promise about time. The ansible makes it possible for distant actors to coordinate while coordination still matters. In policy, timing decides whether analysis changes outcomes or becomes a tidy footnote. We aim to publish while Congress, agencies, courts, companies, and cities can still use what we write. When the facts change, we will revisit our priors.

The name guards us, too, against a common failure mode in Washington: mistaking rhetoric for reach. Faster-than-light communication does not abolish politics. It gives capable institutions the chance to coordinate and act with less friction and more foresight. That is enough. Our work is to help those institutions—public and private—see around corners, understand constraints, and choose well.

What to Expect

What you can expect here, then, is writing with the builders in mind and the public in view. We will begin with the technology. We will integrate economics, law, and philosophy as tools rather than talismans. We will try to be timely without being faddish, principled without being doctrinaire, and ambitious without being naïve. We will take seriously the way choices at one layer of the stack ripple across the others. We will pay attention to incentive gradients, institutional competence, and constitutional limits. Most of all, we will never pretend that complexity is an excuse for paralysis.

The last reason we chose this moniker is that the ansible refuses the fantasy of omnipotence that sometimes clings to technology. Instant communication in Le Guin’s books never makes disagreement disappear. It never erases culture or preempts moral risk. It simply gives communities a better chance to meet their responsibilities with eyes wide open. That vision keeps us oriented toward the work that matters in tech policy right now: expanding capacity without stifling competition, securing critical infrastructure without freezing innovation, moderating at scale without deputizing private censors, globalizing supply chains while hedging against authoritarian leverage.

Calling this Substack The Ansible is our way of committing to that balance. We want to move the right ideas quickly to the people who can use them. We want to knit together the technical and the civic, the near-term constraint and the long-term horizon. If we do our job, this publication will not just talk about the future; it will help bring the best versions of it into being sooner.

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