The issue of rural communication development has been conventionally examined under labels such as universal service, digital, divide, broadband deployment, and E-Government, which generally fall into two seemingly distinct categories - access and applications. In China, these concepts are...

This paper was the first initiative to try to define Web 2.0 and understand its implications for the next generation of software, looking at both design patterns and business modes. Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the...

A growing number of communities across the United States are adopting policies to promote advanced telecommunication services, including broadband access. This paper offers a taxonomy for classifying these local government initiatives and provides preliminary empirical results for a sample of...

Municipal electric utilities (MEUs) are increasingly expanding into telecommunications services. Such entry is interesting in several respects. First, MEUs marry two potential pathways for the growth of telecommunications access infrastructure and services: public ownership of last-mile...

DRMs are intellectual property institutions. They transpose the empirical principle of copyright, which implicitly recognizes that specific ownership rules should be attached to non scientific creation, into the digital era. The legal protection of DRMs, a private means of enforcing content...

The plan announced last week in Philadelphia to create a government-owned wireless broadband network isn't needed, is economically and technologically unsound and will put the city's taxpayers at great financial risk. The Wireless Philadelphia Business Plan promises (1) ubiquitous broadband...

As the 'Washington Consensus' reforms are losing momentum in Latin America, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is calling for shifting the focus from the content of policy choices to the political process of their implementation. As this paper studies the paradigmatic case of...

P2P networks have mainly been used for downloading cultural goods. This sociological research focuses on the practices and norms of users and designers. Drawing on a qualitative survey, it explores the many ways sharing takes place. It looks at P2P networks as file sharing communities and probes...

Italian Abstract: La commistione tra indefiniti obblighi di servizio pubblico e obiettivi commerciali in capo ad un’unica emittente da un lato riduce gli stimoli all’efficienza di gestione, aumentando i costi di produzione del servizio pubblico, e dall’altro, ingessando l’assetto del...

As the 'Washington Consensus' reforms are losing momentum in Latin America, the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB) is calling for shifting the focus from the content of policy choices to the political process of their implementation. As this paper studies the paradigmatic case of...