Introduction

The Introduction shows the trajectory of the Internet and the Internet of Things for the past fifty years in the three main locations. In the United States it has created a service economy worth over seven trillion dollars (GAFAM). In the East it has created an integrated architecture of infrastructure, hardware, and services but with a focus on control. In Europe it has led to about 17 Acts and Directives that aim to bring some digital agency. Each zone of action has confronted this ontological shift through the dominant lens on norms and values. Entrepreneurial capitalism allowed for shareholder companies to acquire as much wealth as several nations combined with mundane human activities: looking for things and items, looking for goods, for friends…This capital allowed them to innovate with every new step in storage, interaction, and analysis. China, creating its own bubble through deep packet inspection, was the first political system to understand the ontological nature of the change. Governance should not be on the analogue and the digital apart but on the hybrid and new entities specific to this change. Its political governance structure has many scientists and engineers. It has created quite stable cybernetics, but it remains to be seen if the level of control will not be challenged by the data flow in innovation. In Europe the main driver of political and entrepreneurial power is the “rule of law.” Its first attempt to regulate at the level of data, GDPR, was quite successful in that it was copied to many other countries. The success of the legal response has led to a belief in the “Brussels effect.” From the Chip Act to the AI and Cyber Resilience Act regulation on chip, device, cloud, algorithms the EU is counting on compliance to bring it some agency in the hybrid that it currently lacks.