Jan. 18, 2007: Simon Wilkie and Susan Crawford address "New Cyberfrontiers"01.18.07 | |
Speaker: Simon Wilkie is a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and executive director of USC's interdisciplinary Center for Communication Law and Policy. His research focuses on game theory, its application to regulation and policy design, and the economics of the communications industries.
An associate professor in Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, Susan Crawford is a former partner in the Washington, DC, offices of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. Her areas of specialization include intellectual property, advertising, privacy, domain names and e-commerce policy issues.
Abstract: (Wilkie) In 2005 the regulatory framework in the U.S. for internet access changed from a traditional telecom model to a so called "Title I" or information service framework. At this stage, Title I is an unknown quantity and the details are yet to be written. Wilkie proposes a simple regulatory mechanism that could be adopted and relate our proposal to the Net Neutrality debate
(Crawford) Both regulators and traditional incumbents see the internet as a distribution chain, delivering new digitized forms of the services with which they are familiar. Little attention is being paid to the role of online human communications in an abundant system characterized by positive feedback and potentially unlimited scale.
In the past, the goal of communications law has been to maximize the incentives of network builders to provide particular forms of infrastructures that were necessarily intertwined with particular forms of communications. From the point of view of incumbent telephony, cable, and broadcast providers, this approach made eminent sense. But in light of the advent of the internet, communications law has to now be about facilitating diverse communications. In order to foster increasing returns, both economic and cultural, our top national priority must be to facilitate the generation of new ideas - and new ideas are more likely to come from the internet than from anywhere else, because they will come from human communications that are not centrally chosen.