Data: Governance and Geopolitics

Interesting article here from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Written by Gregory F. Treverton, a senior adviser.

“How data is governed can be thought of along several lines of activity: legislating privacy and data use, regulating content, using antitrust laws to dilute data monopolies, self-regulating by the tech giants, regulating digital trade, addressing intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement, assuring cybersecurity, and practicing cyber diplomacy. Of these, antitrust, regulation, and privacy are most immediately in the spotlight, and are the focus of this commentary, but it will also touch briefly on the connections with other issues.”


I have written a lot that data is data ( and not oil) but this article misses the point about the difference between

  • Data Governance (micro)

  • Data Governance (marco)

  • Governance with Data

Data governance (micro) is a massively important and large field focused on ensuring that the quality, provenance, lineage of data, including bias, ethics, data analysis, statistics and many more topics.  Is ensure that the data that is used and how it is used to make decisions is of the best quality possible.

Data Governance (marco) as per the article is on the border topic of international regulation for data. 

Governance with Data is where the board, those in office and those in positions of authority are given or presented with data (via a data governance process) to make complex judgment.   


The take away “The digital age presents geopolitical and philosophical problems with complexity and speed beyond the reach of the existing global architecture that underrepresents both emerging powers, like China, and ever more influential private sector actors, from the tech giants to the Gates Foundation. We are addressing twenty-first-century problems with a twentieth-century mindset, approach, and toolkit. is the take-away. “ with an eighth-century view of sovereign, governance and oversight.  We have to update our more than just our mindset to embrace this change. We need to upgrade the very nature of understand hierarchy, power, influence, agency and purpose to name a few.