This page lists required and supplemental readings for each module of the course.
Textbook: Nuechterlein, J., and P. Weiser. Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. ISBN: 0262140918.
Module 1: Technology
Required Readings
Clark, David D. “An Insider’s Guide to the Internet” (PDF)
———. “Architecting a Networked Application” (PDF)
———. “Readings on Alternative Futures for the Internet” (PDF)
Blumenthal, Marjory S., and David D. Clark. “Rethinking the Design of the Internet: The End-to-End Arguments vs. the Brave New World.” ACM Transactions on Internet Technology 1, no. 1 (August 2001): 70-109.
Supplemental Readings
Textbook, Chapter 2, part I (pp. 31-45), and Chapter 4, up to section on broadband technology (pp. 115-134). Useful background for students not already familiar with telecommunications and Internet technology.
Agilent Technologies. “Digital Modulation in Communications Systems - An Introduction.” Application Note 1298, 2001. (PDF)
Markey, Hedy Kiesler, and George Antheil. U.S. Patent 2,292,387. Secret Communication System; filed June 10, 1941; approved August 11, 1942.
Module 2: Policy Rationale and Methods
Required Readings
Textbook, Chapter 1.
Bray, Hiawatha. “Groups mobilize against fees for bulk e-mailings: YAHOO®, AOL target spam.” Boston Globe, February 28, 2006.
Blogging Policy Proposal (PDF)
Supplemental Readings
Textbook, rest of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.
Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. ISBN: 0262011727.
Stone, Deborah. Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393976254. (Recommended for students without ESD.10 pre-requisite.)
Module 3a: Spectrum Policy
Required Readings
Textbook, Chapters 7 and 8.
Hazlett, Thomas. “The Wireless Craze, The Unlimited Bandwidth Myth, The Spectrum Auction Faux Pas, and the Punchline to Ronald Coase’s “Big Joke” An Essay on Airwave Allocation Policy.” AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Working Paper 01-01, January 2001.
Faulhaber, Gerald, and David Farber. “Spectrum Management: Property Rights, Markets and the Commons.” Wharton School Working Paper, University of Pennsylvania, 2003. (PDF)
FCC Spectrum Policy Task Force; Paul Kolodzy, director. “SPTF Report.” ET Docket No. 02-135 (November 2002). (PDF)
Kwerel, Evan, and John Williams. “A Proposal for a Rapid Transition to Market Allocation of Spectrum.” OSP Working Paper 38, Federal Communications Commission, November 2002. (PDF)
Lehr, William. “Economic Case for Dedicated Unlicensed Below 3GHz.” 2004. (PDF)
Supplemental Readings
Of these, the Marcus/WIK report provides a good recent summary overview of reform policies in a number of countries.
Baumol, William, and Dorothy Robyn. “Toward an Evolutionary Regime for Spectrum Governance: Licensing or Unrestricted Policy?” AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, 2006.
Benkler, Yochai. “Some Economics of Wireless Communications.” Presented at TPRC October 2002. (PDF)
Carter, Kenneth, Ahmed Lahjouji, and Neal McNeil. “Unlicensed and Unshackled: A Joint OSP-OET White Paper on Unlicensed Devices and Their Regulatory Issues.” OSP Working Paper 39, Federal Communications Commission, May 2003. (PDF)
Cave, Martin. “Reforming UK Spectrum Policy.” White Paper prepared for UK Spectrum Management Review, March 2002.
Farquhar, Michele C., and Ari Q. Fitzgerald. “Legal and regulatory issues regarding spectrum rights trading.” Telecommunications Policy 27, no. 7 (August 2003): 527-532.
Lehr, William, and Jon Crowcroft. “Managing a Spectrum Commons.” IEEE DySPAN 2005, Baltimore, November 2005. (PDF)
Lehr, William, Sharon Gillett, and Fuencisla Merino. “Software Radio: Implications for Wireless Services, Industry Structure, and Public Policy.” Communications and Strategies, IDATE, no. 49 (1st Quarter 2003): 15-42. (PDF)
Lehr, William, and Lee W. McKnight. “Wireless Internet access: 3G vs. WiFi?” Telecommunications Policy 27, no. 5-6 (June-July 2003): 351-370. (PDF)
Marcus, J., Lorenz Nett, Mark Scanlan, Ulrich Stumpf, Martin Cave, and Gerard Pogerel. “Towards More Flexible Spectrum Regulation.” WIK-Consult, Germany, December 2005.
Noam, Eli. “Beyond spectrum auctions. Taking the next step to open spectrum access.” Telecommunications Policy 21, no. 5 (June 1997): 461-475.
Owen, Bruce, and Gregory Rosston. “Spectrum Allocation and the Internet.” In Cyber Policy and Economics in an Internet Age. Edited by William Lehr and Lorenzo Pupillo. Boston MA: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 2002.
UK Radiocommunications Agency. “Strategy for the future use of the Radio Spectrum in the UK.” UK Spectrum Strategy Report, March 2002.
Werbach, Kevin D. “Supercommons: Toward a Unified Theory of Wireless Communication.” Texas Law Review 82, March 2004. (Available at SSRN.)
Werbach, Kevin. “Radio Revolution: The Coming Age of Unlicensed Wireless.” New America Foundation, 2003.
Special Lecture: “Open Access, or, Making Money Openly” (Clark). March 14.
Module 3b: Copyright and Information
Required Readings
Holson, Laura M. “Ice-T’s Take on Napster, the Law and Morality.” The New York Times on the Web; August 7, 2000; nytimes.com; accessed Jan 28, 2005.
Zittrain, Jonathan. “The Copyright Cuffs.” CIO Magazine, October 15, 2003.
Mann, Charles. “Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea?” Atlantic Monthly (September 1998).
Netanel, Neil W. “Copyright and the First Amendment; What Eldred Misses - and Portends.” In Copyright and Free Speech: Comparative and International Analyses. Oxford University Press, 2005. (Available at SSRN.)
Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ISBN: 0226902110. Cited by Lessig as his inspiration for his model of the modalities of control, the “new” Chicago School.
Lessig, Lawrence. “The New Chicago School.” Journal of Legal Studies 27, no. 2 (June 1998). (PDF)
“Privacy and Piracy: The Paradox of Illegal File Sharing on Peer-to-Peer Networks and the Impact of Technology on the Entertainment Industry.” Hearing Before the United States Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, September 30, 2003. The testimony offers insights into how the various constituencies are considering the problem of digital content. See, in particular, the testimony of the MPAA’s Jack Valenti and that of Sharman Network’s Alan Morris. For a particularly extreme view of intellectual property, see the testimony of James DeLong ( PDF).
Biddle, P., P. England, M. Peinado, and B. Willman. “The darknet and the future of content distribution.” 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management. Washington DC, November 18, 2002.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Remote Control: The Rise of Electronic Cultural Policy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597 (January 2005): 122-133.
Stallman, Richard. “The Right To Read.” Communications of the ACM 40, no. 2 (February 1997).
Netanel, Neil. “Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society.” 106 Yale Law Journal 283 (1996).
Bowman, Lisa. “Programmers enroll in political training.” CNet News, June 10, 2002.
Supplemental Readings
Samuelson, Pamela. Economic and Constitutional Influences on Copyright Law in the United States. – A formal discussion of the differences between U.S. and European copyright law.
Mann, Charles. “The Heavenly Jukebox.” Atlantic Monthly (September 2000).
European Union Copyright Directive from the Campaign for Digital Rights.
The Statute of Anne. From The History of Copyright: A Critical Overview With Source Texts in Five Languages, a forthcoming book by Karl-Erik Tallmo.
Lemley, Mark A. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 291 (August 2004). (Available at SSRN.)
Wu, Tim. “Copyright’s Communications Policy.” Michigan Law Review 103 (November 2004): 278. (Available at SSRN.)
Anderson, Chris. “The Long Tail.” Wired (October 2004).
Love, Courtney. “Love’s Manifesto.” Salon.com (June 14, 2000).
Solum, Lawrence B., and Minn Chung. “The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law.” University of San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. (Available at SSRN.)
Cave, Damien. “Chained Melodies.” Salon.com (March 13, 2002).
Lessig, Lawrence. “The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach.” Harvard Law Review 113 (1999). (PDF)
This article is a highly compressed version of the basic content of Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which includes more examples and is in a somewhat more approachable style.
Boutin, Paul. “See you on the darknet.” Slate (January 28, 2004).
Hansell, Saul. “Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground.” The New York Times, September 15, 2003.
Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc.; United States Courts of Appeal for the Sixth Circuit (No. 03-5400); October 26, 2004.
Boyle, James. “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.” 66 Law and Contemp. Probs. 33 (Winter/Spring 2003).
Carroll, Michael W. “The Struggle for Music Copyright.” Villanova Law/Public Policy Research Paper No. 2005-7. (Available at SSRN.)
Grimmelmann, James. “Regulation By Software.” Yale Law Journal 114, no. 7 (May 2005).
Madden, Mary. “Artists, Musicians and the Internet.” Pew Internet and American Life Project (December 5, 2004).
MGM v. Grokster, U.S. Supreme Court No. 04-480 (slip opinion, June 27, 2005). (PDF)
Electronic Frontier Foundation. “RIAA v. The People: Two Years Later.” November 2, 2005. (PDF)
Schwarz, John. “With Cable TV and M.I.T, Who Needs Napster.” New York Times, October 27, 2003.
This article describes the once shut down, but now recently restarted LAMP Project at MIT – an indication of just how byzantine is the law of copyright in the digital age.
May, Christopher. “Digital rights management and the breakdown of social norms.” firstmonday, no. 8 (November 2003).
Barlow, John Perry. “The Economy of Ideas.” Originally appeared in Wired Magazine, 2.03; March 1994.
Fisher, William. “An Alternative Compensation Scheme.” Chapter 6 in Promises To Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2004.
Bollier, David. Introduction and Excerpts from Brand Name Bullies, The Quest to Own and Control Culture. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
McLeod, Kembrew. Freedom of Expression®. New York, NY: Doubleday; 2005. (PDF - 2.2 MB)
This text on intellectual property was released under a Creative Commons license. The title refers to the fact that Prof. McLeod was awarded the trademark to “Freedom of Expression.”
Module 3c: Interconnection of Service Providers
Required Readings
Textbook, Chapter 9.
Sicker, Douglas. “Further Defining a Layered Model for Telecommunications Policy.” October 2002. (PDF)
DeGraba, Patrick. “Bill and Keep at the Central Office As the Efficient Interconnection Regime.” OPP Working Paper Series No. 33, Federal Communications Commission, December 2000. (PDF)
Kende, Michael. “The Digital Handshake: Connecting Internet Backbones.” OPP Working Paper Series No. 32, Federal Communications Commission, 2000. (PDF)
Supplemental Readings
Textbook, Chapter 10.
Armstrong, Mark. “The Theory of Access Pricing and Interconnection.” In Handbook of Telecommunications Economics. Edited by Martin Cave, Sumit Majumdar, and Ingo Vogelsang. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland, 2001.
Charles River Associates. “Interconnection Pricing: Bill and Keep Compared to TSLRIC.” Final Report submitted to Telecom NZ, April 2003.
European Commission (2002a), Access to, and interconnection of, electronic communications networks and associated facilities, Communications Services: Policy and Regulatory Framework, INFSO A/1, Brussels April 24, 2002.
Federal Communications Commission. “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking In the Matter of Developing a Unified Intercarrier Compensation Regime.” CC Docket No. 01-92, April 27, 2001.
Gabel, David. “A Competitive Market Approach to Interconnection Payments.” In Networking Knowledge for Information Societies: Institutions and Intervention. Edited by Robin Mansell, Rohan Samarajiva, and Amy Mahan. Delft, The Netherlands: Delft University Press, 2002.
Intven, Hank, ed. “Interconnection.” Module 3 of Telecommunications Regulation Handbook. Prepared for infoDev Program of the World Bank, 2000.
UK Office of Communications. “Effective Competition Review of Internet Connectivity.” August 23, 2001.
Vogelsang, Ingo. “Price Regulation of Access to Telecommunications Networks.” April 2003. Journal of Economic Literature 41, no. 3 (September 2003): 830-862.
Module 3d: Broadband Access - Broadband Access Technology and Policy
Required Readings
Textbook, Chapter 4 (remaining section on broadband technology, pp. 134-147) and Chapter 5.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. “Developments In Local Loop Unbundling.” DSTI/ICCP/TISP(2002)5/FINAL. September 10, 2003, pp. 1-14. (PDF)
Supplemental Readings
Ikeda, Nobuo. “How the ‘Japanese Miracle’ of Broadband Came About.” 2003.
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits. Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2002.
Johnston, David, and Hassan Yaghoobi (Intel® Corp.) “Peering into the WiMax Spec.” Especially part I. CommsDesign, January 20, 2004.
Banerjee, Anupam, and Marvin Sirbu. “Towards Technologically and Competitively Neutral Fiber to the Home (FTTH) Infrastructure.” Presented at TPRC, Alexandria, Va., September 20-21, 2003. (PDF)
In addition to being an interesting paper on FTTH policy, this work is also an example of engineering cost modeling applied to communications policy - a potential TPP thesis approach.
Johnston, James H., and J. H. Snider. “Breaking the Chains: Unlicensed Spectrum as a Last-Mile Broadband Solution.” New America Foundation, Spectrum Policy Program Issue Brief #11, June 2003.
Module 3d: Broadband Access - Case Studies: VoIP, Municipal Broadband
Required Readings
Textbook, Chapter 6.
Terena (Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association). “Regulatory/Legal Considerations.” In IP Telephony Cookbook. 2004. (PDF)
Oram, Andy. “The State of VoIP.” O’Reilly Network, October 22, 2004.
Krim, Jonathan. “FCC Probes Blocking of Internet Phone Calls.” Washington Post, February 17, 2005, p. E01.
Gillett, Sharon, William Lehr, Marvin Sirbu, and Carlos Osario. Collected research papers on Municipal Broadband. Broadband Working Group, MIT Communications Futures Program.
Thierer, Adam D. “Risky Business: Philadelphia’s Plan for Providing Wi-Fi Service.” (PDF) Progress and Freedom Foundation, April 2005.
Module 3d: Broadband Access - Network Neutrality
Required Readings
O’Connell, Patricia. “At SBC, It’s All About Scale and Scope.” Business Week Online, November 7, 2005.
Wu, T. “Network Neutrality and Broadband Discrimination.” Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law 3, no. 69.
Farrell, Joseph, and Phil Weiser. “Modularity, Vertical Integration, and Open Access Policies: Towards a Convergence of Antitrust and Regulation in the Internet Age.” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 17, no. 1 (Fall 2003). (Available at SSRN.)
Felten, Ed. “Managing the Internet” Blog Postings. In Freedom to Tinker. See in particular the postings on March 2, 7, 13, and 21, 2006; but feel free to browse the older entries as well.
van Schewick, B. “Towards an Economic Framework for Network Neutrality Regulation.” Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September 20, 2005.
Lemley, M. A., and L. Lessig. “The End of End-to-End: Preserving the Architecture of the Internet in the Broadband Era.” UCLA Law Review 48, no. 4 (2001): 925-972. (Available at SSRN.)
Supplemental Readings
Center for Digital Democracy. “The Assault on Network Neutrality.” Multiple postings. On this site, Cisco Systems’ “Deploying Premium Services using Cisco Service Control Technology” is one of the better white papers for getting a feel for vendor offerings in this space. (PDF)
Windhausen, John, Jr. “Good Fences Make Bad Broadband: Preserving an Open Internet Through Net Neutrality.” Public Knowledge, Feb 6, 2006. (PDF)
Senate Commerce Committee Hearings on Network Neutrality, February 7, 2006. (PDF)
Bar, F., S. Cohen, P. Cowhey, B. DeLong, M. Kleeman, and J. Zysman. “Access and Innovation Policy for the Third-Generation Internet.” Telecommunications Policy 24, no. 6-7 (2000): 489-518.
IPTV
Required Readings
Textbook, Chapters 11 and 12.
