The Real Cost of Convenience

We regulated electricity when it became clear it would change the world; why not today’s disruptive technology as well? On the latest episode of Policy Prompt, host Vass Bednar sits down with preeminent legal scholar Tim Wu to discuss his latest book, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Knopf, 2025). Wu, who famously coined the term “net neutrality,” argues that our modern obsession with convenience has become a “blackmail” tactic used by tech giants to erode individual agency and monopolize market power.

In this paper, S. Yash Kalash explores the evolution of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) from a discreet “central bank of central banks” to a primary architect of the global digital financial order. Kalash argues that through its coordination of pilots in tokenized assets, digital financial supervision driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum-safe cryptography, the BIS is building a new “internet of finance.”

Climate change is no longer an environmental issue; it is a national security concern. In this commentary, Andrew Heffernan explains how rising temperatures, extreme weather events and ecological degradation directly affect military readiness, infrastructure resilience and operational capacity.

Although Canada is considered one of the most innovative countries in the world, its productivity has been lagging. In this commentary, Savvas Chamberlain looks at how this issue affects not only economists and policy makers, but also business leaders, procurement officers and educators.

As the United States retreats from multilateralism and China exports its model of digital authoritarianism, the open internet is splintering into “digital islands” governed by control rather than interoperability. In this commentary, Konstantinos Komaitis argues that middle powers must step into the stewardship vacuum — not by appealing to values, but by re-engineering openness as a strategic and economically rational infrastructure.