Communications Policy in Transition

Until the 1980s, it was presumed that technical change in most
communications services could easily be monitored from centralized state and federal
agencies. This presumption was long outdated prior to the commercialization of the
Internet. With the Internet, the long-forecast convergence of voice, video, and text
bits became a reality. Legislation, capped by the Telecommunications Act of 1996,
created new quasi-standards such as "fair" and "reasonable" for the FCC and courts
to apply, leading to nonstop litigation and occasional gridlock.This book addresses
some of the many telecommunications areas on which public policy makers, corporate
strategists, and social activists must reach agreement. Topics include the
regulation of access, Internet architecture in a commercial era, communications
infrastructure development, the Digital Divide, and information policy issues such
as intellectual property and the retransmission of TV programming via the
Internet.