Telecommunications Policy: Understanding the Politics behind Wiring the World

Public Administration 395, Summer 2000; July 24-August 10; MTWTh 4:00 pm -- 7:30 pm

Instructor: Prof. Thomas Streeter, Dept. of Sociology, University of Vermont, 31 So. Prospect St., 656-2167; thomas.streeter@uvm.edu; http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete

This course will be offered via UVM's Distance Learning Network. It is open to graduate students enrolled in the Masters of Public Administration program, and by instructor's permission.

Overview: How are the policies that shape electronic communication created? What are they today? How are they changing? How should they be changed? What can the history of telecommunications teach us that might contribute to the understanding of current issues? These and related questions will be the focus of this graduate seminar on telecommunications policy. Specific areas will include state and federal regulation of telecommunication, the convergence of the computer and media industries, intellectual property issues, "private" non-governmental forms of industry regulation, free speech, access, and universal service principles, and the emergence of internet regulation.

This graduate level course will look at policymaking in the communications industries; it also looks at the political and economic forces that shape policymaking. While much of the time will be devoted to learning the details of policies and the policymaking process, attention will also be given to broad questions of social and political theory such as: What is the relation of policy (public and private) to the institutions of telecommunications as a whole? Do policies make a difference in media content or social impact of communication systems? If policies do make a difference, how? If not, why not? Is there a difference between policy and politics? What are the different ways of conceptualizing the relations between telecommunications industries and government? What do the history of policy and the nature of the policy process suggest about current debates about the role of communication in social life, and/or the nature of decision making in contemporary society?

Readings: A textbook has been ordered at the UVM bookstore: Patricia Aufderheide's Communications Policy and the Public Interest (Guilford, 1999). You could also get it through Amazon.com. (If you're planning on taking this course and want to get a jump on the reading, which will be substantial, start there.) Most of the rest of the readings will be available through the Bailey-Howe library's electronic reserve system or via the web; in most cases, you'll be able to click on the readings below to download them for printing.

Assignments: Students will participate in class discussions, prepare "memos" for presentation and distribution during the class, and write a research paper, (due no later than August 21).

Technical requirements: a few modest technical skills and capabilities are required for this course. You will need to be able to easily and regularly get and send email messages from the class dicussion list (Telecommpolicy@list.uvm.edu). You will also need to be able to send and receive email attachments in Word or RTF format. And you will need to be able to access and learn to navigate and do research using the Lexis/Nexis online database of news and legal information; if your link to the internet is not via the UVM campus or via together.net, you'll need to do some configuring.

Course Outline (a rough draft)

Aufderheide, "Introduction" and "Chapter 1: Background" pp. 1-36.

Rowlands, Ian. 1996. "Understanding Information Policy: Concepts, Frameworks and Research Tools," Journal of Information Science 22, no. 1: 13-25.

"State to Federal, Railroads to Trusts," in Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 57-79.

Bernard Schwartz, ed., The Economic Regulation of Business and Industry: A Legislative History of US Regulatory Agencies, (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), Vol. I.
pp. 3-13, "The Federal Regulatory Commissions"
pp. 17-20, "Interstate Commerce Act, 1887: Commentary"
pp. 593-595, "Hepburn Act, 1906: Commentary"

David Warsh, "When the Revolution was a party: How privatization was invented in the 1960s," The Boston Sunday Globe, October 20, 1991, pp. A33-A35.

Robert Merges, "The end of friction? Property rights and contract in the "newtonian" world of on-line commerce," Berkeley technology law journal Vol. 12, no 1; http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/12_1/Merges/html/reader.html

Julie E. Cohen "Lochner in Cyberspace: the New Economic Orthodoxy of 'Rights Management,'" Michigan Law Review, November, 1998, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 462

Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society," from Television: Technology and Cultural Form, pp. 3-13.

Thomas Streeter, "A Revisionist History of Broadcasting, 1900-1934," from Selling the Air, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 59-110.

Memo Topics: What happened to TV's channel 1? To CBS's version of color television in the early 1950s? What are the current regulations governing HDTV? Why can't I watch it yet?

Memo Topics: What happened to consumer forms of DAT? How do private corporations communicate with one another, establish shared habits of behavior, and otherwise coordinate their activities? What is "regulation by raised eyebrow?"

Krasnow, Longley, and Terry, "Five Determiners of Regulatory Policy," and "Congress: Powerful Determiner of Regulatory Policy," from The Politics of Broadcast Regulation (New York: St. Martin's, 1982), pp. 33-132.

Thomas Streeter, "Blue Skies and Strange Bedfellows: the Discourse of Cable TV," in Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (eds.), The Revolution wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict , Routledge, 1997, pp. 221-242.

Thomas Streeter, "Inside the Beltway as an Intepretive Community: The Politics of Policy," in Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 113-162.

Entman, R. M. & Wildman, S. (1992). Reconciling economic and non- economic perspectives on media policy: Transcending the 'Marketplace of Ideas.' Journal of Communication, 42,1, pp. 5-19.

Tim Frazer, "The Policy of Antitrust," from Monopoly: Competition and the Law. New York, N.Y. St Martin’s Press. 1988.

Harmeet Sawhney, "The public telephone network: Stages in Infrastructure Development," Telecommunications Policy, September/October 1992, pp. 538-552.

Memo Topics: Who has jurisdiction over internet phone calls? in Vermont? in the U.S? internationally? Can Adelphia Cable legally stop you from downloading TV shows via your Adelphia supplied cable modem? Is it legal for UVM to ban napster on campus? Is it legal for together.net to do so?

Shields, Peter, Brenda Dervin, Christopher Richter, and Richard Soller, Who needs 'POTS-plus' services? A comparison of residential user needs along the rural-urban continuum. Telecommunication Policy, November 1993, pp. 563-587.

Memo Topics: What are Vermont's regulatory bodies relevant to telecommunications? How do people get appointments to them?

Memo Topics: 911, callerid, low-income regs.

Jonathan Weinberg, entry on "Broadcasting and Related Media" in the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (Supplement II, forthcoming 2000) http://www.law.wayne.edu/weinberg/encyclo.htm

Memo Topics: Why can someone say "f---" on HBO but not on CBS, ABC, or NBC? Why is it that you never see someone actually drink any beer in TV commercials for beer? Why don't they advertise whisky on network TV? cigarettes? What is pervasive presence, and does it matter?

Memo Topics: What does Adelphia do to support PEGs, and why? Why does Adelphia cable in Burlington carry Montreal's public French TV station? Why does cable television in Montreal carry Burlington's commercial TV stations? What do you have to do to legally start a radio station on an unused FM channel? if someone else already has a license to that channel?

Memo Topics: Were there countries where it was legal to freely copy and distribute videos of movies in 1982? are there any today? What is the Berne convention? What is TRIPPS, and what are its implications for copyright law? Can you copyright computer fonts? a database of student names and phone numbers? the personal web page of one of your employees that she put up on your company's server? Are you violating copyright when you download and print out ereserve articles for this course? What are residuals, and why do people in the entertainment industry stay up late talking about them? Who (if anyone) owns the lecture notes you take during class? the videotapes of lectures? What percentage of patents are owned by private inventors, corporations, or universities?

Aufderheide, Chapters 2-5, pp. 37-112.

Zakon, Robert H. 1997. Hobbes' Internet Timeline v3.1 (revised 25 August 1997) . [On-line] http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html

Lawrence Lessig, "Governance," Draft 3.0 (Keynote: CPSR Conference on Internet Governance, October 10, 1998), http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lessig.html.

Jonathan Weinberg's testimony before the House Commerce Committee, Subcommitte on Oversight and Investigations, Hearing on "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?", July 22, 1999 (and his response to the written questions the subcommittee chair sent afterwards)

Jonathan Weinberg, "Internet Governance", forthcoming  in Transnational Cyberspace Law (Makoto Ibusuki ed. 2000).

Memo Topics: How do you get your own domain name, and what do you have to do to keep it if someone tries to take it away from you?

Memo Topics: Can the Provost of the University of Vermont legally read your emails to your secret lover? Is using your credit card to buy The Anarchist's Cookbook over the internet from www.neverheardofthem.com a bigger privacy risk than giving your credit card to the waiter at Pizza Putt?