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- Network economic effects (5)
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Articles 1 - 30 of 37
Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering
Administrative Law In The Automated State, Cary Coglianese
Administrative Law In The Automated State, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
In the future, administrative agencies will rely increasingly on digital automation powered by machine learning algorithms. Can U.S. administrative law accommodate such a future? Not only might a highly automated state readily meet longstanding administrative law principles, but the responsible use of machine learning algorithms might perform even better than the status quo in terms of fulfilling administrative law’s core values of expert decision-making and democratic accountability. Algorithmic governance clearly promises more accurate, data-driven decisions. Moreover, due to their mathematical properties, algorithms might well prove to be more faithful agents of democratic institutions. Yet even if an automated state were …
The First Amendment, Common Carriers, And Public Accommodations: Net Neutrality, Digital Platforms, And Privacy, Christopher S. Yoo
The First Amendment, Common Carriers, And Public Accommodations: Net Neutrality, Digital Platforms, And Privacy, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Recent prominent judicial opinions have assumed that common carriers have few to no First Amendment rights and that calling an actor a common carrier or public accommodation could justify limiting its right to exclude and mandating that it provide nondiscriminatory access. A review of the history reveals that the underlying law is richer than these simple statements would suggest. The principles for determining what constitutes a common carrier or a public accommodation and the level of First Amendment protection both turn on whether the actor holds itself out as serving all members of the public or whether it asserts editorial …
Transparency And Algorithmic Governance, Cary Coglianese, David Lehr
Transparency And Algorithmic Governance, Cary Coglianese, David Lehr
All Faculty Scholarship
Machine-learning algorithms are improving and automating important functions in medicine, transportation, and business. Government officials have also started to take notice of the accuracy and speed that such algorithms provide, increasingly relying on them to aid with consequential public-sector functions, including tax administration, regulatory oversight, and benefits administration. Despite machine-learning algorithms’ superior predictive power over conventional analytic tools, algorithmic forecasts are difficult to understand and explain. Machine learning’s “black-box” nature has thus raised concern: Can algorithmic governance be squared with legal principles of governmental transparency? We analyze this question and conclude that machine-learning algorithms’ relative inscrutability does not pose a …
The Tao Of The Dao: Taxing An Entity That Lives On A Blockchain, David J. Shakow
The Tao Of The Dao: Taxing An Entity That Lives On A Blockchain, David J. Shakow
All Faculty Scholarship
In this report, Shakow explains how a decentralized autonomous organization functions and interacts with the U.S. tax system and presents the many tax issues that these structures raise. The possibility of using smart contracts to allow an entity to operate totally autonomously on a blockchain platform seems attractive. However, little thought has been given to how such an entity can comply with the requirements of a tax system. The DAO, the first major attempt to create such an organization, failed because of a programming error. If successful examples proliferate in the future, tax authorities will face significant problems in getting …
Common Carriage’S Domain, Christopher S. Yoo
Common Carriage’S Domain, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The judicial decision invalidating the Federal Communications Commission's first Open Internet Order has led advocates to embrace common carriage as the legal basis for network neutrality. In so doing, network neutrality proponents have overlooked the academic literature on common carriage as well as lessons from its implementation history. This Essay distills these learnings into five factors that play a key role in promoting common carriage's success: (1) commodity products, (2) simple interfaces, (3) stability and uniformity in the transmission technology, (4) full deployment of the transmission network, and (5) stable demand and market shares. Applying this framework to the Internet …
Regulating By Robot: Administrative Decision Making In The Machine-Learning Era, Cary Coglianese, David Lehr
Regulating By Robot: Administrative Decision Making In The Machine-Learning Era, Cary Coglianese, David Lehr
All Faculty Scholarship
Machine-learning algorithms are transforming large segments of the economy, underlying everything from product marketing by online retailers to personalized search engines, and from advanced medical imaging to the software in self-driving cars. As machine learning’s use has expanded across all facets of society, anxiety has emerged about the intrusion of algorithmic machines into facets of life previously dependent on human judgment. Alarm bells sounding over the diffusion of artificial intelligence throughout the private sector only portend greater anxiety about digital robots replacing humans in the governmental sphere. A few administrative agencies have already begun to adopt this technology, while others …
Open Source, Modular Platforms, And The Challenge Of Fragmentation, Christopher S. Yoo
Open Source, Modular Platforms, And The Challenge Of Fragmentation, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Open source and modular platforms represent two powerful conceptual paradigms that have fundamentally transformed the software industry. While generally regarded complementary, the freedom inherent in open source rests in uneasy tension with the strict structural requirements required by modularity theory. In particular, third party providers can produce noncompliant components, and excessive experimentation can fragment the platform in ways that reduce its economic benefits for end users and app providers and force app providers to spend resources customizing their code for each variant. The classic solutions to these problems are to rely on some form of testing to ensure that the …
Cloud Computing, Contractibility, And Network Architecture, Christopher S. Yoo
Cloud Computing, Contractibility, And Network Architecture, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The emergence of the cloud is heightening the demands on the network in terms of bandwidth, ubiquity, reliability, latency, and route control. Unfortunately, the current architecture was not designed to offer full support for all of these services or to permit money to flow through it. Instead of modifying or adding specific services, the architecture could redesigned to make Internet services contractible by making the relevant information associated with these services both observable and verifiable. Indeed, several on-going research programs are exploring such strategies, including the NSF’s NEBULA, eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA), ChoiceNet, and the IEEE’s Intercloud projects.
Cyber Espionage Or Cyber War?: International Law, Domestic Law, And Self-Protective Measures, Christopher S. Yoo
Cyber Espionage Or Cyber War?: International Law, Domestic Law, And Self-Protective Measures, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Scholars have spent considerable effort determining how the law of war (particularly jus ad bellum and jus in bello) applies to cyber conflicts, epitomized by the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Many prominent cyber operations fall outside the law of war, including the surveillance programs that Edward Snowden has alleged were conducted by the National Security Agency, the distributed denial of service attacks launched against Estonia and Georgia in 2007 and 2008, the 2008 Stuxnet virus designed to hinder the Iranian nuclear program, and the unrestricted cyber warfare described in the 1999 book by …
Moore’S Law, Metcalfe’S Law, And The Theory Of Optimal Interoperability, Christopher S. Yoo
Moore’S Law, Metcalfe’S Law, And The Theory Of Optimal Interoperability, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Many observers attribute the Internet’s success to two principles: Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law. These precepts are often cited to support claims that larger networks are inevitably more valuable and that costs in a digital environment always decrease. This Article offers both a systematic description of both laws and then challenges the conventional wisdom by exploring their conceptual limitations. It also explores how alternative mechanisms, such as gateways and competition, can permit the realization benefits typically attributed to Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law without requiring increases in network size.
U.S. Vs. European Broadband Deployment: What Do The Data Say?, Christopher S. Yoo
U.S. Vs. European Broadband Deployment: What Do The Data Say?, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
As the Internet becomes more important to the everyday lives of people around the world, commentators have tried to identify the best policies increasing the deployment and adoption of high-speed broadband technologies. Some claim that the European model of service-based competition, induced by telephone-style regulation, has outperformed the facilities-based competition underlying the US approach to promoting broadband deployment. The mapping studies conducted by the US and the EU for 2011 and 2012 reveal that the US led the EU in many broadband metrics.
• High-Speed Access: A far greater percentage of US households had access to Next Generation Access (NGA) …
Technological Determinism And Its Discontents, Christopher S. Yoo
Technological Determinism And Its Discontents, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
This book review takes a critical review of the claim advanced by Susan Crawford in Captive Audience that the merger between Comcast and NBC Universal would harm consumers and that policymakers should instead promote common carriage regulation and subsidize municipal symmetrical gigabit fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). First it evaluates the extent to which next-generation digital subscriber lines (DSL) and wireless broadband technologies can serve as effective substitutes for cable modem service, identifying FCC data showing that the market has become increasingly competitive and likely to continue to do so. Furthermore, the market is not structured in a way that would permit the …
Possible Paradigm Shifts In Broadband Policy, Christopher S. Yoo
Possible Paradigm Shifts In Broadband Policy, Christopher S. Yoo
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Debates over Internet policy tend to be framed by the way the Internet existed in the mid-1990s, when the Internet first became a mass-market phenomenon. At the risk of oversimplifying, the Internet was initially used by academics and tech-savvy early adopters to send email and browse the web over a personal computer connected to a telephone line via networks interconnected through in a limited way. Since then, the Internet has become much larger and more diverse in terms of users, applications, technologies, and business relationships. More recently, Internet growth has begun to slow both in terms of the number of …
Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo
Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Legal issues increasingly arise in increasingly complex technological contexts. Prominent recent examples include the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), network neutrality, the increasing availability of location information, and the NSA’s surveillance program. Other emerging issues include data privacy, online video distribution, patent policy, and spectrum policy. In short, the rapid rate of technological change has increasingly shown that law and engineering can no longer remain compartmentalized into separate spheres. The logical response would be to embed the interaction between law and policy deeper into the fabric of both fields. An essential step would …
The Taxation Of Cloud Computing And Digital Content, David Shakow
The Taxation Of Cloud Computing And Digital Content, David Shakow
All Faculty Scholarship
“Cloud computing” raises important and difficult questions in state tax law, and for Federal taxes, particularly in the foreign tax area. As cloud computing solutions are adopted by businesses, items we view as tangible are transformed into digital products. In this article, I will describe the problems cloud computing poses for tax systems. I will show how current law is applied to cloud computing and will identify the difficulties current approaches face as they are applied to this developing technology.
My primary interest is how Federal tax law applies to cloud computing, particularly as the new technology affects international transactions. …
When Antitrust Met Facebook, Christopher S. Yoo
When Antitrust Met Facebook, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Social networks are among the hottest phenomena on the Internet. Facebook eclipsed Google as the most visited website in both 2010 and 2011. Moreover, according to Nielsen estimates, as of the end of 2011 the average American spent nearly seven hours per month on Facebook, which is more time than they spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Microsoft, and Wikipedia combined. LinkedIn’s May 19, 2011 initial public offering (“IPO”) surpassed expectations, placing the value of the company at nearly $9 billion, and approximately a year later, its stock price had risen another 20 percent. Facebook followed suit a year later with …
Network Neutrality And The Need For A Technological Turn In Internet Scholarship, Christopher S. Yoo
Network Neutrality And The Need For A Technological Turn In Internet Scholarship, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
To most social scientists, the technical details of how the Internet actually works remain arcane and inaccessible. At the same time, convergence is forcing scholars to grapple with how to apply regulatory regimes developed for traditional media to a world in which all services are provided via an Internet-based platform. This chapter explores the problems caused by the lack of familiarity with the underlying technology, using as its focus the network neutrality debate that has dominated Internet policy for the past several years. The analysis underscores a surprising lack of sophistication in the current debate. Unfamiliarity with the Internet’s architecture …
Rough Consensus And Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles Into Internet Policy Debates, Christopher S. Yoo
Rough Consensus And Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles Into Internet Policy Debates, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
This is the introduction to a symposium issue for a conference designed to bring the engineering community, policymakers, legal academics, and industry participants together in an attempt to provide policymakers with a better understanding of the Internet’s technical aspects and to explore emerging issues of particular importance to current broadband policy.
Promoting The Buildout Of New Networks Vs. Compelling Access To The Monopoly Loop: A Clash Of Regulatory Paradigms, Christopher S. Yoo
Promoting The Buildout Of New Networks Vs. Compelling Access To The Monopoly Loop: A Clash Of Regulatory Paradigms, Christopher S. Yoo
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No abstract provided.
Product Life Cycle Theory And The Maturation Of The Internet, Christopher S. Yoo
Product Life Cycle Theory And The Maturation Of The Internet, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Much of the recent debate over Internet policy has focused on the permissibility of business practices that are becoming increasingly common, such as new forms of network management, prioritization, pricing, and strategic partnerships. This Essay analyzes these developments through the lens of the management literature on the product life cycle, dominant designs, technological trajectories and design hierarchies, and the role of complementary assets in determining industry structure. This analysis suggests that many of these business practices may represent nothing more than a reflection of how the nature of competition changes as industries mature. This in turn suggests that network neutrality …
Network Neutrality Or Internet Innovation?, Christopher S. Yoo
Network Neutrality Or Internet Innovation?, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Over the past two decades, the Internet has undergone an extensive re-ordering of its topology that has resulted in increased variation in the price and quality of its services. Innovations such as private peering, multihoming, secondary peering, server farms, and content delivery networks have caused the Internet’s traditionally hierarchical architecture to be replaced by one that is more heterogeneous. Relatedly, network providers have begun to employ an increasingly varied array of business arrangements and pricing. This variation has been interpreted by some as network providers attempting to promote their self interest at the expense of the public. In fact, these …
Innovations In The Internet’S Architecture That Challenge The Status Quo, Christopher S. Yoo
Innovations In The Internet’S Architecture That Challenge The Status Quo, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The current debate over broadband policy has largely overlooked a number of changes to the architecture of the Internet that have caused the price paid by and quality of service received by traffic traveling across the Internet to vary widely. Topological innovations, such as private peering, multihoming, secondary peering, server farms, and content delivery networks, have caused the Internet’s traditionally hierarchical architecture to be replaced by one that is more heterogeneous. Moreover, network providers have begun to employ an increasingly varied array of business arrangements. Some of these innovations are responses to the growing importance of peer-to-peer technologies. Others, such …
The Convergence Of Broadcasting And Telephony: Legal And Regulatory Implications, Christopher S. Yoo
The Convergence Of Broadcasting And Telephony: Legal And Regulatory Implications, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
This article, written for the inaugural issue of a new journal, analyzes the extent to which the convergence of broadcasting and telephony induced by the digitization of communications technologies is forcing policymakers to rethink their basic approach to regulating these industries. Now that voice and video are becoming available through every transmission technology, policymakers can no longer define the scope of regulatory obligations in terms of the mode of transmission. In addition, jurisdictions that employ separate agencies to regulate broadcasting and telephony must reform their institutional structures to bring both within the ambit of a single regulatory agency. The emergence …
Network Neutrality After Comcast: Toward A Case-By-Case Approach To Reasonable Network Management, Christopher S. Yoo
Network Neutrality After Comcast: Toward A Case-By-Case Approach To Reasonable Network Management, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The Federal Communications Commission’s recent Comcast decision has rejected categorical, ex ante restrictions on Internet providers’ ability to manage their networks in favor of a more flexible approach that examines each dispute on a case-by-case basis, as I have long advocated. This book chapter, written for a conference held in February 2009, discusses the considerations that a case-by-case approach should take into account. First, allowing the network to evolve will promote innovation by allowing the emergence of applications that depend on a fundamentally different network architecture. Indeed, as the universe of Internet users and applications becomes more heterogeneous, it is …
Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser
Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser
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For centuries, the fair use doctrine has been the main - if not the exclusive - bastion of user rights. Originating in the English court of equity, the doctrine permitted users under appropriate circumstances to employ copyrighted content without consent from the rightsholder. In the current digital media environment, however, the uncertainty that shrouds fair use and the proliferation of technological protection measures undermine the doctrine and its role in copyright policy. Notably, the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumvention of such measures even for fair use purposes, has diminished the ability of fair use …
Network Neutrality, Consumers, And Innovation, Christopher S. Yoo
Network Neutrality, Consumers, And Innovation, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
In this Article, Professor Christopher Yoo directly engages claims that mandating network neutrality is essential to protect consumers and to promote innovation on the Internet. It begins by analyzing the forces that are placing pressure on the basic network architecture to evolve, such as the emergence of Internet video and peer-to-peer architectures and the increasing heterogeneity in business relationships and transmission technologies. It then draws on the insights of demand-side price discrimination (such as Ramsey pricing) and the two-sided markets, as well as the economics of product differentiation and congestion, to show how deviating from network neutrality can benefit consumers, …
Rethinking Broadband Internet Access, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
Rethinking Broadband Internet Access, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The emergence of broadband Internet technologies, such as cable modem and digital subscriber line (DSL) systems, has reopened debates over how the Internet should be regulated. Advocates of network neutrality and open access to cable modem systems have proposed extending the regulatory regime developed to govern conventional telephone and narrowband Internet service to broadband. A critical analysis of the rationales traditionally invoked to justify the regulation of telecommunications networks--such as natural monopoly, network economic effects, vertical exclusion, and the dangers of ruinous competition--reveals that those rationales depend on empirical and theoretical preconditions that do not apply to broadband. In addition, …
What Can Antitrust Contribute To The Network Neutrality Debate?, Christopher S. Yoo
What Can Antitrust Contribute To The Network Neutrality Debate?, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Over the course of the last year, policymakers have begun to consider whether antitrust can play a constructive role in the network neutrality debate. A review of both the theory and the practice of antitrust suggests that it does have something to contribute. As an initial matter, antitrust underscores that standardization and interoperability are not always beneficial and provides a framework for determining the optimal level of standardization. In addition, the economic literature and legal doctrine on vertical exclusion reveal how compelling network neutrality could reduce static efficiency and show how mandating network neutrality could impair dynamic efficiency by deterring …
Mandating Access To Telecom And The Internet: The Hidden Side Of Trinko, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
Mandating Access To Telecom And The Internet: The Hidden Side Of Trinko, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
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Antitrust has long played a major role in telecommunications policy, demonstrated most dramatically by the equal access mandate imposed during the breakup of AT&T. In this Article we explore the extent to which antitrust can continue to serve as a source of access mandates following the Supreme Court's 2004 Trinko decision. Although Trinko sharply criticized access remedies and antitrust courts' ability to enforce them, it is not yet clear whether future courts will interpret the opinion as barring all antitrust access claims. Even more importantly, the opinion contains language hinting at possible bases for differentiating among different types of access, …
Keeping The Internet Neutral?: Tim Wu And Christopher Yoo Debate, Tim Wu, Christopher S. Yoo
Keeping The Internet Neutral?: Tim Wu And Christopher Yoo Debate, Tim Wu, Christopher S. Yoo
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"Net neutrality" has been among the leading issues of telecommunications policy this decade. Is the neutrality of the Internet fundamental to its success, and worth regulating to protect, or simply a technical design subject to improvement? In this debate-form commentary, Tim Wu and Christopher Yoo make clear the connection between net neutrality and broader issues of national telecommunications policy.