An introduction to the concepts of economics within the telecommunications industry, which takes an international perspective and covers such issues as critical trends, costing, demand, pricing, regulation and performance.

This volume of papers by leading telecommunications experts from around the world addresses in an integrated fashion the ongoing transformation of telecommunications. The book covers technology, economics, the law, and other social sciences and focuses on both theory and policy. Major topics include the impact of new technology on networks and users, network evolution and firm structure and strategy, pricing and interconnection, demand and policy for the Internet, and competition and the United States Telecommunications Act of 1996. The papers in this book represent a unique integration of topics, appropriate for a converging industry, and they also include the first wide-ranging analysis and critique of telecommunications policy in the United States following the 1996 Act.

Delivering IT projects on time and within budget while maintaining privacy, security, and accountability is one of the major public challenges of our time. The Handbook of Public Information Systems, Second Edition addresses all aspects of public IT projects while emphasizing a common theme: technology is too important to leave to the technocrats.

`Cyberspace' is the emerging invisible, intangible world of electronic information and processes stored at multiple interconnected sites. The digital revolution leads to `convergence' (of telecommunications, computer/Internet and broadcasting) and to dynamic multimedia value chains. Deregulation and competition are major driving forces in the new interactive electronic environment. This volume contains normative proposals for `cyber'-regulation, including self-regulation, grounded on developments in the EU, US and the Far East, in international organisations (WTO, OECD, WIPO, ITU), in business fora, in NGOs, in the `Internet community' and in academic research. The multi-actor (government, business, civil society) and multi-level analysis (subsidiarity) pertains e.g. to ex-ante and ex-post access-regulation, competition, network economics (external effects, essential facilities), public interest principles (human dignity, free speech, privacy, security), development and culture, consumer protection, cryptography, domain names and copyright. Lawyers, regulators, business executives, investment bankers, diplomats, and civil society representatives need shared essentials of plurilateral `governance' to safeguard both competition and public interest objectives, at a scale congruent to `cyberspace', in the transition to an `international law of cooperation'.