Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2006), "Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age", Library Review, Vol. 55 No. 9, pp. 646-648. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530610706914

Commentary on the telecommunications and telephony industry tends to fall into three categories – a raft of specialist journal and journalistic pieces (above all on the Internet), monographs on specialist aspects like competition economics or technical standards or wireless network effects, and textbooks that rapidly date. Tele‐ (or electronic) communications is also a hybrid field, taking in broadcasting and telephony, satellite technology and sociocultural factors like privacy and surveillance, and this means that new studies rarely please – the lawyers want this, policy wonks want that, technical folk want something else. Digital crossroads, however, fulfil long awaited expectations in delivering a highly informed, topical, unpatronising, subtly argued analysis of telecommunications policy in the USA at and since 1996, the time of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and the time when digital and broadband were about to change everything.

It is one of those books written by really clever insiders who do not want to show off, something which at its best The MIT Press excels at. Information and library professionals, particular those engaged with Internet and telecoms related activities, trying to understand the fast changing global policy picture in telecoms, or selecting materials to support academic and practitioner courses on telecoms (and even in some but not all cases, communication too), will be pleased to see and own this book, which at the price for a hardback is value for money. So fast changing (and successful) has it been so far, that on the publisher’s website visitors can read the authors’ new preface to the second printing (autumn 2005, after the first printing in January 2005). This new preface is far from a throw away, too, with incisive thoughts on mergers and convergence in the industry, and updates on the scope of law [on information and telecommunication services, regulating DSL or digital subscriber line based Internet telephone access, net neutrality and regulating voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)].

With telecoms, it is impossible to understand regulation without competition, law without technology, any of these without policy and politics and without social and cultural change. Most if not all readers will have experienced for themselves the transformation from analogue to digital, from incumbent provider telecoms structures to the diversity of deregulated markets, from a few players to many and perhaps back to a few through convergence, from wireline to wireless technology with Internet deliverables like cellular telephony and VoIP taking out (or changing the role of) the intermediary operator and pointing forward to a time when issues like last mile carrier status will have vanished for ever.

That said, telecoms dilemmas and balances remain, like interoperability between networks and interconnection compensation, tradeoffs between regulatory control (by bodies like the FCC or Federal Communications Commission in the USA) or allowing the free market to ride (the rationale of regulation being that this disenfranchises some under universal access principles, whatever diversity and innovation it might encourage), relationships across the chain (between backbone providers and companies, between government and cable licensees, between industry and regulator). The US approach tends to give industry more of its head, while the EU approach trusts more to regulatory control. And they have to deal with each other.

Digital Crossroads is a well documented, long but clear, examination of telecoms policy in the USA in the last decade or so. At every stage, with wireline and wireless, mobile and spectrum, it explains the technology before going on to law and policy, making it accessible to readers without deep background knowledge. Taking up complex issues like spectrum and standards and intercarrier compensation, key issues are identified at the start, and this means that chapters have clear focus. Extensive notes are provided (pp. 533‐641) as well as a full bibliography and table of legal authorities, kept in their place for deeper research.

Nuechterlein and Weiser are both lawyers with direct telecoms experience and they really know how to write, engaging the reader in the dilemmas faced by the FCC over convergence, incumbent power over bandwidth, interconnection and unbundling and carrier obligations, trying to anticipate the effect of broadband, responding to lobbying, knowing where and how to intervene, outsourcing standard setting and trying to manage competition (that perhaps impossible balancing act between regulatory control and market forces). Readers familiar with the network and software industry and the monopoly global proprietary products and services can give there, will readily identify with the issues raised here in the related field of telecoms policy, above all in the USA where what happens affects everyone else.

Ultimately, the hall mark of this book, within the well managed complexity, is the strong simplicity of its central points about the FCC, regulation and competition. As an intellectual launch pad for understanding what has happened in telecoms up to now, it cannot be bettered. Even so, by an irony, as the new preface implies, it creates expectations of a new study in the foreseeable future. I hope these authors will get together once again and write it.