Beyond Broadband Access

After broadband access, what next? What role do metrics play in understanding “information societies”? And, more important, in shaping their policies? Beyond counting people with broadband access, how can economic and social metrics inform broadband policies, help evaluate their outcomes, and create useful models for achieving national goals? This timely volume not only examines the traditional questions about broadband, like availability and access, but also explores and evaluates new metrics more applicable to the evolving technologies of information access.

Beyond Broadband Access brings together a stellar array of media policy scholars from a wide range of disciplines—economics, law, policy studies, computer science, information science, and communications studies. Importantly, it provides a well-rounded, international perspective on theoretical approaches to databased communications policymaking in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Showcasing a diversity of approaches, this invaluable collection helps to meet myriad challenges to improving the foundations for communications policy development.

Richard D. Taylor holds the Palmer Chair at Pennsylvania State University, where he is professor of Telecommunications Studies, Affiliate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, and codirector of the Penn State Institute for Information Policy. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 1989, he was vice president and corporate counsel at Warner Cable Communications, where he had overall responsibility for the Law Department of the nation’s second largest cable television operator. Subsequent to his arrival at Penn State, he was appointed to the board of Primestar Partners Ltd. as one of two independent directors. He is cofounder of the Institute for Information Policy at Penn State, which undertakes sponsored research and self-funded programs on the social implications of information technology, with an emphasis on the potential of information technologies for improving democratic discourse, social responsibility, and quality of life. At Penn State, his projects have received funding from Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, and the Ford Foundation, among others. Dr. Taylor is active nationally and internationally. He was a member of the Obama campaign’s Technology/Media/ Telecommunications Advisory Group, and is a former member of the boards of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and of the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC). He was co-chair of the PTC’s annual conference in 2009 and 2010. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, and the Federal Communications Bar Association. He holds a doctorate in Mass Communications from Columbia University and a law degree from New York University School of Law.Schejter Amit M. :

Amit M. Schejter is associate professor of Communication Studies at Ben- Gurion University of the Negev and associate professor of Communications and codirector of the Institute for Information Policy at Pennsylvania State University. His research, teaching, and service integrate a comprehensive approach to communication policy and its application to the everyday challenges created by the unequal distribution of resources and the silencing of the public’s voice. His studies have been widely published in both communication and law journals, cited in congressional and Knesset hearings, and have dealt with the challenges raised by the introduction of radio, television, cable, the Internet, mobile phones, and digitization in Israel, the United States, Korea, the European Union, and across wide international comparative settings. His background includes a decade of holding senior executive positions in the telecommunications industry in Israel, among them general counsel for Israeli public broadcasting and vice president of Israel’s largest mobile operator. In addition, he served on and chaired a variety of public committees, counseled media and telecommunication entities in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and was Mundus Scholar at the universities of Amsterdam and Hamburg. His books include The Wonder Phone in the Land of Miracles: Mobile Telephony in Israel (coauthored with Akiba Cohen and Dafna Lemish, 2008), Muting Israeli Democracy: How Media and Cultural Policies Undermine Freedom of Expression (2009), and . . . And Communications for All: A Policy Agenda for a New Administration (2009).

“Making communications policy is difficult because policymakers are constantly
forced to select one among multiple policy alternatives when neither principles nor theory can provide a definitive answer. Ideally data-based analysis could be used to resolve such uncertainties, but all too frequently the data available and empirical methods employed to analyze it are not up to the task. Beyond Broadband: Developing Data-Based Information Policy Strategies tackles this problem head-on. Chapters by leading communications policy scholars identify problems with the data and empirical methods currently employed to address communications policy problems, offer suggestions for improving both, and recommend process improvements to improve the way data-based analysis is used to inform policy decisions. Communications policy scholars and policy officials should both find this book to be a helpful resource.”