Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Priliminary Critique Of Draft Media Laws With Special Reference To The Kica Bill 2013, Muiru Ngugi

Charles Muiru Ngugi

The Constitution of Kenya 2010 gives priority to the enactment of statutes relating to media law. These new laws are expected to be aligned to the very progressive provisions on free expression, media freedom as well as data protection and freedom of information. I have quickly perused through the recently published Kenya Information and Communications Authority (KICA) and Media Council of Kenya (MCK) Bills, and proffer my initial reaction.

The Wires Go To War: The U.S. Experiment With Government Ownership Of The Telephone System During World War I, Michael A. Janson, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the U.S. telephone system is that it has always been privately owned, in stark contrast to the pattern of government ownership followed by virtually every other nation. What is not widely known is how close the United States came to falling in line with the rest of the world. For the one-year period following July 31, 1918, the exigencies of World War I led the federal government to take over the U.S. telephone system. A close examination of this episode sheds new light into a number of current policy issues. The history confirms …

Copyright Freeconomics, John M. Newman

John M. Newman

Innovation has wreaked creative destruction on traditional content platforms. During the decade following Napster’s rise and fall, industry organizations launched litigation campaigns to combat the dramatic downward pricing pressure created by the advent of zero-price, copyright-infringing content. These campaigns attracted a torrent of debate, still ongoing, among scholars and stakeholders—but this debate has missed the forest for the trees. Industry organizations have abandoned litigation efforts, and many copyright owners now compete directly with infringing products by offering licit content at a price of $0.

This sea change has ushered in an era of “copyright freeconomics.” Drawing on an emerging body …

Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection And Monopoly In The Making Of The American Telephone System, Milton Mueller

Books

This book, based on years of archival research at the AT&T/Bell Labs in the aftermath of the divestiture, was originally published in 1997 as part of the MIT Press/AEI Series on Telecommunications Regulation. Acclaimed by reviewers such as Lawrence Lessig as “extraordinary” and “a crisply written mix of history and clear theory,” the small press run was sold out by 2002. Nevertheless, every year I encountered people who asked where they could get copies. The AEI series had long come to an end, its funds gone and its editorial team disbanded, making a new press run all but impossible.

It …

Is There A Role For Common Carriage In An Internet-Based World?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

During the course of the network neutrality debate, advocates have proposed extending common carriage regulation to broadband Internet access services. Others have endorsed extending common carriage to a wide range of other Internet-based services, including search engines, cloud computing, Apple devices, online maps, and social networks. All too often, however, those who focus exclusively on the Internet era pay too little attention to the lessons of the legacy of regulated industries, which has long struggled to develop a coherent rationale for determining which industries should be subject to common carriage. Of the four rationales for determining the scope of common …