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Full-Text Articles in Law

Municipal Fiber In The United States: A Financial Assessment, Christopher S. Yoo, Jesse Lambert, Timothy P. Pfenninger Jun 2022

Municipal Fiber In The United States: A Financial Assessment, Christopher S. Yoo, Jesse Lambert, Timothy P. Pfenninger

All Faculty Scholarship

Despite growing interest in broadband provided by municipally owned and operated fiber-to-the-home networks, the academic literature has yet to undertake a systematic assessment of these projects’ financial performance. To fill this gap, we utilize municipalities’ official reports to offer an empirical evaluation of the financial performance of every municipal fiber project in the U.S. operating in 2010 through 2019. An analysis of the actual performance of the resulting fifteen-project panel dataset reveals that none of the projects generated sufficient nominal cash flow in the short run to maintain solvency without infusions of additional cash from outside sources or debt relief. …


Possible Paradigm Shifts In Broadband Policy, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2014

Possible Paradigm Shifts In Broadband Policy, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …


Open Connectivity, Open Data: Two Dimensions Of The Freedom To Seek, Receive And Impart Information In The New Zealand Bill Of Rights, Jonathon Penney Jan 2012

Open Connectivity, Open Data: Two Dimensions Of The Freedom To Seek, Receive And Impart Information In The New Zealand Bill Of Rights, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Recently, ideas about "rights" to Internet access or connectivity have received growing recognition from governments, legal institutions, and other political actors in several countries, including New Zealand Despite this emerging political and legal recognition, there are few, if any, systematic studies exploring such ideas. This paper aims to change this. First, it offers a theoretical exploration of the idea of a "right" to Internet access, including the diferent versions of such rights talk. Secondly, it examines whether there is any legal basis for such rights claims in New Zealand and ultimately argues that section 14 of the New Zealand Bill …


Internet Access Rights: A Brief History And Intellectual Origins, Jonathon Penney Jan 2011

Internet Access Rights: A Brief History And Intellectual Origins, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

If there is anything we have learned from recent protest movements around the world, and the heavy-handed government efforts to block, censor, suspend, and manipulate Internet connectivity, it is that access to the Internet, and its content, is anything but certain, especially when governments feel threatened. Despite these hard truths, the notion that people have a "right" to Internet access gained high-profile international recognition last year. In a report to the United Nations General Assembly in early 2011, Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, held that Internet access should be recognized as a "human right". …


Cyberplace: Defining A Right To Internet Access Through Public Accommodation Law, Colin Crawford Jan 2003

Cyberplace: Defining A Right To Internet Access Through Public Accommodation Law, Colin Crawford

Publications

Following the introduction, Part II makes the case that public accommodation law is an appropriate legal vehicle to establish a right of Internet access. Part III begins with a brief review of the current state of public accommodation law followed by a consideration, in light of that review, of some of the possible limitations of public accommodation principles for regulating the Internet. I will then identify which aspects of the Internet should be classified as places of public accommodation. In this connection, I will examine debates about the nature and scope of public accommodation principles as they apply to persons …