The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the US. Half of the country now requires age verification to watch porn or access "harmful" content. Digital rights advocates are pushing back against legislation they say will make the internet less safe. To prove you're an adult, you may have to upload your ID or submit to an age-verifying face scan. Members of Congress considered 19 online safety bills Tuesday that may soon have a major impact on the future of the internet as age-verification laws have spread to half of the US and around the world .

The Trump administration's pressure on European regulators is having an impact, with fewer restrictions on Big Tech and canceled measures. Almost everything is on hiatus. The EU AI Act, Digital Services Act, and Digital Markets Act are all at risk. The European Commission is preparing to end the year with virtually no movement on its most important tech policy initiatives. Many measures may even be reversed.

Marietje Schaake is a former Dutch member of the European parliament. She is now the international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Her new book is entitled The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. In terms of power and political influence, what are the main differences between big tech and previous incarnations of big business? The difference is the role that these tech companies play in so many aspects of people's lives: in the state, the economy, geopolitics.

Last fall, around the same time as a historic amount of funding for expanding broadband access across the country passed into law, a friend introduced me to a video game called Death Stranding. Within the first few minutes, I realized that while the game was maybe not for me as a gamer. It felt a little too immersive, and I didn't like the huge monsters and assassin types floating around everywhere. But it appealed to me in my professional role advocating for universal access to telecommunications service. Though Death Stranding was released before COVID-19, the pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns created an unavoidable parallel between real life and the world of the game that revealed in both cases, the essential nature of networked communications. The game's designer has explicitly reiterated the importance of connection as one of the game's main themes.

"How do you do that without creating unintended consequences?" said Casey Ellis, founder of San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup Bugcrowd Inc. "That's a hard problem to solve, and I think she's been pretty thoughtful about it." A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Ms. Harris served as California's attorney general as Silicon Valley companies such as Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. grew into global titans and critics began questioning their influence. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. While vice presidents have limited power to shape or enforce policy from the White House, advocates say she could help prioritize the tech industry's policy wishlist, which includes issues such as immigration reform. The Trump administration has curtailed visas for highly skilled workers, drawing rebukes from Silicon Valley in recent months.

Ursula von der Leyen was elected on Tuesday as the new President of the European Commission by 383 Members of the new European Parliament. She is the first woman to hold the office. A centre-right politician and close ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, she was until this week Germany's defense minister. So what does her election mean for EU tech policy over the next five years? We did get a glimpse of her priorities in her Tuesday morning speech addressing the plenary of the European Parliament ahead of her confirmation vote.

The future of work: ABB robotic arms work on the bodyparts of Mini cars, on January 17, 2017. While trade and foreign agents received most of the blame during the presidential campaign, technological developments can have an even larger impact on income inequality. Entrepreneurs in the digital economy have generated numerous new jobs and higher incomes for many. At the same time, the Internet has put enormous pressure on local and national labor markets. If the Trump administration wants to succeed in creating sustainable jobs and income for the workers and regions bypassed by the digital transformation, it needs to implement a tech policy that boosts the positive impacts of technology while controlling its corrosive effects.

Rachel Law, the 20-something co-founder of a New York startup called Kip, is sitting next to me at a café, tapping her phone screen to show how the company's service based on artificial intelligence allows users to shop while on Slack by communicating not in typed or spoken words but in cartoonish emoji. If Law were doing this demo for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton and used the terms artificial intelligence, Slack and emoji in the same sentence, each candidate's brain would no doubt seize up like an engine that had run out of oil. We have a problem, folks. Over the next four-year presidential term, a swarm of fantastic new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, blockchain, personal genomics and drones, will profoundly alter society, business and geopolitics in ways we've never seen. And our two major-party presidential candidates don't have a clue.