In this riveting treatise, coauthors Bob Zelnick and Eva Zelnick sound the alarm on the debilitating effect that looming regulations, rules, and powerful interests would have on today's regulation-free Internet. The authors lay out the imminent threats—from “network neutrality” to FCC regulations—that would rob this global, society-changing, communication powerhouse forever of its full potential.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) open access license. Net neutrality is the most contested Internet access policy of our time. This book offers an in-depth explanation of the concept, addressing its history since 1999, its engineering, the policy challenges it represents and its legislation and regulation. Various case studies are presented, including Specialized Services and Content Delivery Networks for video over the Internet, and the book goes on to examine the future of net neutrality battles in Europe, the United States and developing countries, as well as offering co-regulatory solutions based on FRAND and non-exclusivity. It will be a must-read for researchers and advocates in the net neutrality debate, as well as those interested in the context of communications regulation, law and economic regulation, human rights discourse and policy, and the impact of science and engineering on policy and governance.

In the months after the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 2017 decision to repeal network neutrality as US policy, it is easy to forget the decades of public, organizational, media and governmental struggle to control digital policy and open access to the internet. Using dialogic communication tactics, the public, governmental actors and organizations impacted the ruling through YouTube comments, the FCC online system and social network communities. Network neutrality, which requires that all digital sites can be accessed with equal speed and ability, is an important example of how dialogic communication facilitates public engagement in policy debates. However, the practice and ability of the public, organizations and media to engage in dialogic communication are also greatly impacted by the FCC’s decision. This book reflects on decades of global engagement in the network neutrality debate and the evolution of dialogic communication techniques used to shape one of the most relevant and critical digital policies in history.

This comprehensive textbook by the editor of Law and the Internet seeks to provide students, practitioners and businesses with an up-to-date and accessible account of the key issues in internet law and policy from a European and UK perspective. The internet has advanced in the last 20 years from an esoteric interest to a vital and unavoidable part of modern work, rest and play. As such, an account of how the internet and its users are regulated is vital for everyone concerned with the modern information society. This book also addresses the fact that internet regulation is not just a matter of law but increasingly intermixed with technology, economics and politics. Policy developments are closely analysed as an intrinsic part of modern governance. Law, Policy and the Internet focuses on two key areas: e-commerce, including the role and responsibilities of online intermediaries such as Google, Facebook and Uber; and privacy, data protection and online crime. In particular there is detailed up-to-date coverage of the crucially important General Data Protection Regulation which came into force in May 2018.

The ways in which Internet traffic is managed have direct consequences on Internet users’ rights as well as on their capability to compete on a level playing field. Network neutrality mandates to treat Internet traffic in a non-discriminatory fashion in order to maximise end users’ freedom and safeguard an open Internet. This book is the result of a collective work aimed at providing deeper insight into what is network neutrality, how does it relates to human rights and free competition and how to properly frame this key issue through sustainable policies and regulations. The Net Neutrality Compendium stems from three years of discussions nurtured by the members of the Dynamic Coalition on Network Neutrality (DCNN), an open and multi-stakeholder group, established under the aegis of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

Regulations impact a wide array of market and social activities that influence our daily lives. Regulations are attempts to correct perceived market failures, caused by information asymmetries, externalities, and principal-agent problems, and to provide public goods, which would otherwise be underprovided. Government actors are responsible for identifying these issues, weighing the costs and benefits of intervention, and designing and implementating regulations to improve society. Good regulations help mitigate issues in the economy without inciting new problems and without the costs exceeding the benefits of intervention. This requires intensive analysis and an awareness of the complexities of social life. Our society is complex and dynamic where people face knowledge and incentive problems, whether in the market, politics, or civil society. By examining this complex reality, we can better understand why regulations arise and persist and the challenges of reform. We argue that this approach to policymaking and policy analysis requires humility; an acknowledgment of the challenges we face when intervening in our society. This volume intends to cultivate an appreciation for the complexity of human decision making and the incentives that drive human behavior. By examining specific policy changes, it will delve into the effects of and lessons learned from regulations in financial markets, computer and internet governance, and health care innovation and delivery. This volume will be of interest to students, scholars, and policymakers who seek to understand the complexities of regulation in a dynamic social world.

Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas discovers the prehistory of wireless culture. It examines both the coevolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, and the various populist political climates in which the emerging medium of radio became the chosen means to produce the voice of the people. Based on original archival research in Buenos Aires, Havana, Paris, and the United States, the book develops a literary media theory that understands sound as a transmedial phenomenon and radio as a transnational medium. Analyzing the construction of new social and political relations in the wake of the United States’ 1930s Good Neighbor Policy, Acoustic Properties challenges standard narratives of hemispheric influence through new readings of Richard Wright’s cinematic work in Argentina, Severo Sarduy’s radio plays in France, and novels by John Dos Passos, Manuel Puig, Raymond Chandler, and Carson McCullers. Alongside these writers, the book also explores Che Guevara and Fidel Castro’s Radio Rebelde, FDR’s fireside chats, Félix Caignet’s invention of the radionovela in Cuba, Evita Perón’s populist melodramas in Argentina, Orson Welles’s experimental New Deal radio, Cuban and U.S. “radio wars,” and the 1960s African American activist Robert F. Williams’s proto–black power Radio Free Dixie. From the doldrums of the Great Depression to the tumult of the Cuban Revolution, Acoustic Properties illuminates how novelists in the radio age converted writing into a practice of listening, transforming realism as they struggled to channel and shape popular power.