Telecommunications Act of 1996

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pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The next day, another $30,000 rolled in. The idea that the government would play a permanent and significant role in the information superhighway receded; the NSF pushed forward with full privatization. Meanwhile, a top priority of the first Clinton administration would be telecom deregulation, culminating with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. If a centrist politician in a position of power couldn’t secure a modest public foothold in the new internet, there was little hope for more radical and less influential voices. Among these was Senator Daniel Inouye, who introduced a bill in 1994 that would have made telecom companies reserve up to 20 percent of their capacity for “public uses.”

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the US government, first at the state and then at the federal level, began using this framework to regulate early telecommunications networks like the telegraph. These efforts culminated in the New Deal–era Communications Act of 1934, which firmly established telecommunications providers as common carriers, subject to the oversight of the newly created Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Sixty-two years later, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 emerged in a very different political era. FDR-style social democracy was long dead; Clintonian neoliberalism was ascendant. Industry held immense influence over the legislative process, and it was determined to use that influence to destroy any impediment to squeezing as much profit as possible from the newly privatized internet.

That same year, Inouye also co-sponsored the Communications Act of 1994 (S. 1822), which initially included a clause from Inouye that mandated a similar set-aside of 20 percent. It was later reduced to 5 percent and service was to be provided not for free but at “incremental cost-based rates”; see Patricia Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), 51–53, for an analysis and Congress.gov for the text of the bill. For more on Inouye, see Levine, Surveillance Valley, 126–27; Ernest F. Hollings, “Digital Technology, Rotary Laws,” New York Times, June 13, 1994; Steve Farnsworth and James Love, “High Tech Needs ‘MacNeil/Lehrer,’ Too,” New York Times, July 31, 1994.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

First, Clinton and his administration implemented a regime of fiscal discipline that pleased Wall Street, which was already far along in underwriting the high-tech boom. Second, they committed themselves, under Gore’s leadership, to a multi-year campaign to reinvent government, making it smaller, less intrusive, and more flexible—more suitable, in other words, for a third-wave economy.57 And finally, and most important, they gave their assent to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, reform legislation that would make it possible for Silicon Valley to capitalize fully on its technical innovations. The telecom bill often receives less attention than other Clinton initiatives, such as welfare reform. But it needs to be rescued from this neglect, for it did more than any other piece of legislation in the 1990s to free the most dynamic sector of the economy from regulation and dramatically accelerate the building of a new economy based on neoliberal principles.

It could be endlessly recombinant and open at any point to new users and service providers who wanted to hook up.”62 No single corporation would be able to control such a dynamic platform, accessible at all hours of the day and night to so many users as both producers and consumers. The internet was inherently, restlessly, and relentlessly democratic. Monopolies once ruled the world; but, to paraphrase Karl Marx, their once solid control of markets was now melting into air. Getting the most out of this remarkable digital platform drove the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Signed into law in February, it swept away rules that had long prevented corporations from crossing over from one sector of the industry to another. Phone companies, cable companies, satellite companies, television networks, movie studios, and data providers could all now compete with each other.

Thus, the phenomenal success of Google’s search engine would allow it to control, by 2016, 90 percent of the market. Barely a question had been raised about whether it was good for one unregulated media corporation to have so much influence over how 300-million-plus Americans acquired information.75 Kitman had been right in predicting that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 would bring a new generation of robber barons to life. Gerald Levin turns out not to have been far off in his prediction that five media companies would one day rule the world. The Clinton administration made it possible for that prediction to come true. Wall Street Reform The campaign to unshackle the telecommunications industry marched hand in hand with the campaign to unshackle finance; only then would full free market capitalism be achieved.


pages: 145 words: 43,599

Hawai'I Becalmed: Economic Lessons of the 1990s by Christopher Grandy

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, dark matter, endogenous growth, inventory management, Jones Act, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, minimum wage unemployment, open economy, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996

And the act directed the PUC to prevent cross-subsidization, whereby the profits earned by a firm on services not subject to competition are used to subsidize the costs on competitive services in order to underprice other firms. Act 225 placed Hawai‘i among the leading states in telecommunications reform at the time. The legislation also anticipated some of the features of the federal telecommunications law that Congress was developing and that President Clinton would sign in February 1996. Like the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, however, Act 225 would lead to less action than had been hoped for. Some progress has been made; for example, through July 2000 more than 200 telecommunications companies had applied to the PUC for certificates of authority to provide service. Still, most of the major issues pending in 1995 remain today, unsurprising in an industry 50 Hawai‘i Becalmed transitioning from regulation to competition against a background of multiple jurisdictions and rapid technological change.

See ERTF Eisner, Robert, 27 election, 5, 45, 76–85, 86, 106 electricity prices, 24 Employees Retirement System, 92 environmental protection, 1, 18, 19, 51, 104, 110 ERTF (Economic Revitalization Task Force), 4–5, 59, 63–71, 75, 79, 81, 95, 99, 105, 115–117 Ethics Commission, 92 expenditure ceiling, 24, 47–48 exports, 2, 19–20, 22n. 29, 106–109; Japanese, 11, 21n. 3, 30, 73–74 external effects, 2, 8n. 1, 20, 23, 74, 76, 102, 104, 105, 106–107, 111 Fasi, Frank, 45, 56n. 1 Federal Coastal Zone Management Act, 51 Federal Reserve Board, 18, 26, 28, 29, 33n. 17, 34, 44n. 5, 74, 91 Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, 49 film school, 80, 81, 121 First Hawaiian Bank, 42, 43, 65 Fukunaga, Carol, 69 Fuller, Lawrence, 65 gambling, 110 gasoline prices, 24, 110 general excise tax. See GET general fund. See budget GET (general excise tax), 17, 39, 57n. 9, 60, 66, 67–69, 79, 80, 81, 89, 110, 115, 120; contracting tax base, 15–16 government, size of, 4, 38, 40, 43–44, 76, 77, 78, 105 governor.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Press coverage was nonexistent, so the general public did not have a clue; the media watch group Project Censored ranked the privatization of the Internet as the fourth most censored story of 1995. The number-one most censored story was that of the deliberations leading up to what would become the Telecommunications Act of 1996.40 Why was there no organized or coherent opposition? In view of the dominant noncommercial ethos that had driven the Internet and had been one of its most attractive features before 1995, the lack of opposition is striking. In my view, there were four crucial factors that account for the uncontested triumph of a privatized Internet.

The telephone companies had lent their wires to Internet transmission, and in the 1990s, they—soon followed by the cable companies—realized that the wires were their future, and a lucrative one at that. But there were crucial political victories that needed to be won first, and it was not at all clear that they would win them. The first threat to these firms was the new competition that was going to arrive with the ownership deregulation inscribed in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. There were roughly a dozen major telephone companies in the mid-1990s, some long-distance firms, and seven regional phone monopolies resulting from AT&T having been split up in 1984. There were another eight or so major cable TV and satellite TV companies, each of the cable TV providers having a monopoly license where it operated, and each satellite TV firm had monopoly rights to part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

See donations tax evasion, 144–45, 283n30 tax-return check-offs, 212 technical standards, 133 technological development, 46–47, 48, 49–50, 68–72, 141, 147, 245–46n18, 282n15 for tracking and monitoring, 150 military origins, 162 See also Internet history; research and development teenagers, 241n72 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 104, 106–7, 109, 122, 252n58 telegraph, 104 telephone industry, 93, 94, 106, 107, 109–20, 253n60 complicity in FBI subpoenaing, 166 complicity in wiretapping, 163–64 telephone tapping. See wiretapping television, 69, 110, 120, 128–29, 139, 140 television commercials, 43, 123, 128, 148 television news, 173, 176, 181, 183 terrorism, “war on.”


Cable Cowboy by Mark Robichaux

AOL-Time Warner, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Bear Stearns, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, corporate raider, cotton gin, estate planning, fear of failure, financial engineering, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, oil rush, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, vertical integration

Following the success of its British progenitor, BSkyB, and the launch of Star TV in Asia, as well as a new service in Latin America, the new venture was a way to sink his talons in the U.S. market. To these far-f lung corners of the globe, particularly in the United States, Murdoch would beam News Corp.’s Fox network, Fox News, movies, sports, and children’s shows. Murdoch’s political timing looked superb. President Clinton had just signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which dramatically reshaped the nation’s telecom boundaries in pursuit of a competitive free-for-all. For the first time, the law allowed true competition in both local and long-distance phone service, freed the Baby Bells to get into video, and tried to encourage cable companies to invade the local-phone monopoly.

Per-minute rates had plunged by two-thirds in just two years, from 15 cents to as low as 5 cents, and prices were likely to fall even more once the Baby Bells entered the business. (The Bells, local phone monopolies spun off in the antitrust breakup of AT&T in 1984, had been banned from long distance since then, until the Telecommunications Act of 1996 razed the barriers separating local and longdistance markets.) Long-distance revenue made up more than 75 percent of AT&T’s $51 billion in annual revenue when Mike Armstrong arrived at the company; in four years, it was expected to plummet to just 35 percent. Armstrong needed to find other revenues to offset that sharp decline, and the most likely targets were local phone service (a $110 -billion-a-year market) and the booming new business of Internet access.

And if you were interested in that, we could discuss that.” 6 Armstrong agreed to think about it, but he also was looking at other possible merger partners. He had tried unsuccessfully to link up with America Online and had looked at trying to acquire BellSouth, with more than 17 million local telephone customers. All around AT&T, phone rivals grew bigger and bigger through mergers and alliances, part of the revolution unleashed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. SBC Communications, Incorporated, the Texas Bell, gobbled up Pacific Telesis Group in 1997. Bell Atlantic, TCI’s onetime mate, bought Nynex the same year to form a company called Verizon. MCI, the number two long-distance carrier, agreed to merge with WorldCom, and SBC agreed to buy Ameritech Corporation, the Midwestern Bell.


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Any favors Clinton might owe to Florida growers are dwarfed by the requirements of the telecommunications industry, even apart from what Thomas Ferguson describes as “the best-kept secret of the 1996 election”: that “more than any other single bloc, it was the telecommunications sector that rescued Bill Clinton,” who received major campaign contributions from “this staggeringly profitable sector.” The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the WTO agreements are, in a sense, thank-you notes, though it is unlikely that the outcome would have been very different if a different mix of largesse had been chosen by the business world, suffering at the time from what Business Week had just called “spectacular” profits in yet another “Surprise Party for Corporate America.”29 Prominent among the truths that are not to be recalled are the ones briefly mentioned earlier: the actual record of “Reaganesque rugged individualism” and the “free market gospel” that was preached (to the poor and defenseless) while protectionism reached unprecedented heights and the administration poured public funds into high-tech industry with unusual abandon.

It would have been superfluous: the veil of secrecy was defended with much greater vigilance in our free institutions. Within the United States, few know anything about the MAI, which has been under intensive negotiation in the OECD since May 1995. The original target date was May 1997. Had the goal been reached, the public would have known as much about the MAI as they do about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, another huge public gift to concentrated private power, kept largely to the business pages. But the OECD countries could not reach agreement on schedule, and the target date was delayed a year. The original and preferred plan was to forge the treaty in the World Trade Organization. But that effort was blocked by third world countries, particularly India and Malaysia, which recognized that the measures being crafted would deprive them of the devices that had been employed by the rich to win their own place in the sun.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

For FCC chairman Reed Hundt’s remark, see The State of Competition in the Cable Television Industry: Hearing Before the House Committee on the Judiciary, 105th Cong. (1997) (statement of Reed E. Hundt, Chairman of FCC), available at www.fcc.gov/Speeches/Hundt/spreh754.html. 9. Telecommunications Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-104, 110 Stat. 56 (codified in scattered sections of 47 U.S.C.). For other sources that discuss the Act, see Patricia Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), and Robert W. Crandall, Competition and Chaos: U.S. Telecommunications Since the 1996 Telecom Act (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2005). 10.

Embracing the process of “competition” that was under way, the Bells prepared to make their comeback as a dominant player in a nominally open industry. It was a perfect wedding of a new government ideology and a new corporate calculus when the Bells, AT&T, and the rest of the industry signed on to the Telecommunications Act of 1996.9 The most sweeping legislative overhaul of the business since the Communications Act of 1934 was founded on the principle of “competition everywhere.” The idea was to remove barriers to entry in all segments of the industry, a goal that the Bell companies (Bell Atlantic, Bell South, Pacific Telesis, Verizon, and the rest), the long distance firms (AT&T as well as MCI), and the cable companies all pledged to uphold.

Indeed, the only companies that would manage to survive as challengers in telephony were the cable firms, who had wires of their own running into every home, and whom the Act of 1996 had freed to become an intermodal competitor, the only kind the Bells couldn’t destroy. Nevertheless, within a decade after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, history had repeated itself, and the Bells once again ruled the telephone system unperturbed. The idea of inducing “fierce” competition over Bell’s proprietary wires, like the fledgling companies that had taken the bait, was utterly dead. Wiping out the competition was only half the dream, however, and during this time the Bells were reaching, none too discreetly, for something even bigger than collective control: the reconstitution of the great Bell system itself.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

These arguments helped set the stage for the first major rewriting of American telecommunications policy in sixty years. By the end of 1994, Newt Gingrich and his insurgent Republicans had seized control of the Congress; almost immediately they launched a campaign to deregulate the telecommunications industry. With the Telecommunications Act of 1996, they succeeded. As the act was being developed, the “Magna Carta” helped make clear the House Speaker’s own position and offered a justifying logic for the deregulation of the largest players in the industry. Although the act would ultimately reach out in a number of ways to noncorporate stakeholders, retaining universal service provisions, for instance, and including provisions in support of small entrepreneurs, it also freed massive telecommunications firms and cable companies to expand their operations dramatically.

Although the act would ultimately reach out in a number of ways to noncorporate stakeholders, retaining universal service provisions, for instance, and including provisions in support of small entrepreneurs, it also freed massive telecommunications firms and cable companies to expand their operations dramatically. Moreover, as Patricia Aufderheide has explained, it enshrined in law the notions that undergirded the “Magna Carta.” In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as in the “Magna Carta,” technologies—particularly communication technologies and the Internet—were seen as models of open markets and an open political sphere and at the same time as tools with which to bring them about. In that sense, the act treated the interests of the marketplace and those of the public as if they were fundamentally synonymous.47 Though she may have felt somewhat awkward when she first entered Gingrich’s realm, Dyson returned for a second conference the following year.

Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1988. Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Ashby, Gordon, ed. Whole Earth Catalog $1. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, July 1970. Aufderheide, Patricia. Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Bakardjieva, Maria. “Virtual Togetherness: An Everyday-Life Perspective.” Media, Culture, and Society 25 (2003): 291–313. Bakel, Rogier van. “How Good People Helped Make a Bad Law.” Wired, February 1996. Baldwin, J., and Stewart Brand. Soft-Tech. Sausalito, CA: Whole Earth Catalog, 1978.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

The internet was growing fast, with the dot-com boom taking off in 1995. The world’s fewer than forty million internet users were able to view just over twenty thousand websites.133 Netscape, builder of one of the first browsers, went public that year; Yahoo!, Amazon, and eBay opened their gates too. On February 8, Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The day was historic. The United States would update its telecommunication law for the first time in more than sixty years. The law included a highly controversial provision, the so-called Communications Decency Act. The law was notably restrictive. It went beyond prohibiting the distribution of pornography to children.

., 120–22, 185 Clarke, Richard, 335–37 Clear, Alaska, early-warning site, 99 Clever Trevor, 318 “Clicking Brain Is Cleverer Than Man’s, The” (Daily Herald article), 55 Clinton, Bill, and administration Clipper chip, 273, 275 cyber defense, 322–23 Iraqi weapons inspections breach, 314 Moonlight Maze, 334–35 Solar Sunrise, 315 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 244 Clipper Chip, 274–77 clothing, computerized, 215, 216 Clynes, Manfred, 123–27, 142–43, 154, 155, 224, 345 cockpits, 198 Cocks, Clifford, 249–50, 253 Cohen, William, 322 Cold War, xiii Albe Archer exercise, 208 automation, 110 Stewart Brand and, 167 end of, 246 military cyborg research, 128–40 SAGE, 76–82 space race, 123 and Whole Earth Catalog, 168 Colorado School of Mines, 316 Colossal Pictures, 240 Commerce Department, US, 276 Commodore 64 computer, 228–30 communes, 169 communication and cybernetics, 47 and fire control prediction, 25–26 machines and, 2 phone lines for SAGE, 79 WWII and, 3 Communications Decency Act, 244–45 communication systems, 303 community, 51 Compaq 386 computer, 225 Complex Computer, 29–30 complexity, mechanical self-reproduction and, 116–17 Compuserve, 295 “Computer Analysis of Reflex Control and Organization” (Clynes), 124 computer network breaches, x computer science, 68 computer viruses, 149–51, 305 computer worms, 308 connectivity, 81 “consensual hallucination,” 211, 266 contract killing, 281–82 contradictions, as pattern in history of cybernetics, 348–49 control cybernetics and, 47–48 machines and, 2 WWII and, 3 Cooke, Alistair, 93 Cornerstones of Information Warfare (US Air Force white paper), 306 cosmetic surgery, 162–63 Cosmos Club (Washington, D.C.), 19 counterculture, xiii, 165–94, 341 Stewart Brand and, 166–74 cybernetic myths, 345 cyberspace, 208–9 data gloves, 216 High Frontiers magazine, 184–87 Timothy Leary and, 187–89 psychedelic drugs, 172–73 public-key encryption, 258 Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson), 174–80 the WELL, 191–94 Whole Earth Catalog, 168–72 “Crime and Puzzlement: In Advance of the Law on the Electronic Frontier” (Barlow), 239–40 Crimi, Alfred, 14–16 cruise missiles, 39–42 Cryptanalytics (Friedman and Callimahos), 269 “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” (May), 259–61 crypto anarchy, 246–93; See also cypherpunks cryptography, 247–55, 261 Cryptologic Quarterly, 243 Cryptome, 284 Cuckoo’s Egg, The (Stoll), 308 cults, 161–62 culture, 156–94 and brain as machine, 156–58 counterculture, See counterculture and cybernetic myth, 157–58 L.

Louis, 11 spirituality, cybernetics and, 348 Sputnik I, 123 Stalingrad, 35 Stanford University, 68, 181 Star Wars (film), 199–200, 204, 295–96 State Department, US, 276 Stenger, Nicole, 232–35 Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson), 174–80, 227 Sterling, Bruce, 232, 242 Stibitz, George, 30, 33, 34 Stimpy (hacker), 315 Stimson, Henry, 74 Stoll, Clifford, 308 Stone, Allucquère Rosanne, 234 Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC), 321, 333 Strauss, Erwin, 287 structural unemployment, 109 Stuka dive-bombers, 24 subconscious mind, 163 subservience, intelligence and, 72 suffering, human, 90–91 Sun Microsystems, 314 super cockpit, 199, 202, 206 supercomputers, 77, 78, 146, 187, 324 surveillance, domestic vs. foreign, 273 survival, brain and, 63 symbiosis, 145–46 systems and cybernetic analysis, 51 and environment, 57–61, 63–67 taboos, 89–92 TACOM, See Tank-automotive and Armaments Command tactile sensation/feedback, 129–30, 135, 138 Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM), 132, 133, 135 Tanksley, Mike, 305 taxation, 267, 286 Technical Memo Number 82, 253 technological evolution, biological evolution and, 121–22 technology myths, xiv–xvi Telecommunications Act of 1996, 244 teledildonics, 235–37 telephone, 22 Tenenbaum, Ehud “The Analyzer,” 315 Tenet, George, 307 Terminal Compromise (Schwartau), 308 Terminator (film), 154, 155 Terminator 2 (film), 154 terms, new, 349–50 Texas Towers, 77 theodicy, 91 theoretical genetics, 119 “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata” (von Neumann lectures), 115–16 Third Reich, 43 Thule, Greenland, early warning site, 99 thyraton tube, 27 Tibbets, Paul, 45 Tien, Lee, 270 Time magazine, 3–4, 53, 306 time-sharing, 146, 147, 182 TiNi, 241 Tizard, Sir Henry, 19 Toffler, Alvin, 308–10 Toffler, Heidi, 308–9 Tomahawk cruise missile, 303 TRADOC (US Army Training and Doctrine Command), 299; See also Field Manual (FM) 100-5 Tresh, Tom, 164–65 tribes/tribalism, 193 Trinity College, Oxford, 148 Trips Festival, 193 True Names (Vinge) and crypto anarchy, 258–59, 292–93 and cyberspace, 206–8, 212 and cypherpunk, 265, 266 and Habitat, 229 as inspiration for HavenCo Ltd., 288 Tim May and, 258–59 “Truly SAGE System, The”(Licklider), 144 Truman, Harry S., 75 TRW, 238 Tuve, Merle, 28 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), 120–22 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 149, 343 Übermensch, 140, 291 “Ultimate Offshore Startup, The” (Wired article), 289 ultraintelligent machines, 148–49 unemployment automated factories and, 109–10 automation and, 83, 100 cybernation and, 104 United Arab Emirates, 315 United Kingdom, 317 US Air Force automated defense systems, 71 cyberspace research, 196–206 forward-deployed early warning sites, 99 military cyborg research, 128–29 and virtual space, 195 US Army and cyborg research, 131–32 SCR-268 radar, 18 and V-2 missile, 43–72 US Army General Staff, 11 US Army Medical Corps, 85 US Army Natick Laboratories, 137 US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), 299 US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 276 US Navy Office of Naval Research, 136–37 US Pacific Command (PACOM), 311–13 US Secret Service, 238–39 unit key, 274 University of Birmingham, 19 University of California at Berkeley, 168, 172 University of Cincinnati, 317 University of Pennsylvania, 114 University of Texas, 231 University of Toronto, 316, 320 utopia in 1960s–1990s view of cybernetics, 5 dystopia vs., 6 and Halacy’s vision of cyborgs, 141 as mindset of 1950s research, 117–18 thinking machines and, 4 V-1 (Vergeltungswaffe 1) flying bomb, 39–42 V-2 ballistic missile, 43–44, 73 vacuum tubes, 27, 28, 96, 114 Valley, George, 76, 79–82 Valley Committee (Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee), 76 Vatis, Michael, 321, 334 VAX computer, 191, 194, 200 VCASS (visually coupled airborne systems simulator), 198–206 vehicles, cyborgs vs., 133 Viet Cong, 131 Vietnam War, 295 aftereffects of, 298–99 amputees, 142 and cyborg research, 131–32 and fourth-generation fighter-bombers, 197 and smart weapons, 300 Vinge, Vernor and crypto anarchy, 292–93 and cybernetic myth, 344 and cyberspace, 206–8 and cypherpunk, 265, 266 William Gibson and, 212 and Habitat, 229 as inspiration for HavenCo Ltd., 288 on limitations of IO devices, 228–29 Tim May and, 258–59 and singularity, 149 violence, 267, 285–86 Virginia Military Institute, 270 virtual reality (VR), 220–21 and Cyberthon, 240–43 Jaron Lanier and, 212–19 VCASS, 198–206 virtual space in 1980s, 195–96 and cyberwar, 304–5 and military research, 196–206 in science fiction, 206–8 viruses, 115, 150; See also computer viruses visually coupled airborne systems simulator (VCASS), 198–206 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, 52 von Braun, Wernher, 43 von Foerster, Heinz, 52 Vonnegut, Kurt, 86–87, 129 von Neumann, John, 52 on brain–computer similarities, 114 and cybernetic myth, 344 and ENIAC, 114–15 and Player Piano, 87 and self-replicating machines, 118 virus studies, 115–16 VPL DataGlove, 226 VPL Research, 213–16, 241, 243 VR, See virtual reality VT (variable-time) fuse, 26–27, 40, 41, 67 Walhfred Anderson (fictional character), 87–88 Walker, John, 219–20, 225 “walking truck” (quadruped cyborg), 134–35 Wall Street Journal, 221 Walter, W.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

If the value of end-to-end inheres in the consequences of this neutrality, then a properly implemented mix might achieve end-to-end values without every part of the network being end-to-end. I am grateful to Tim Wu for making this point to me. 7 The Telecommunications Act of 1996 does not define broadband. It refers to broadband as a characteristic of “advanced telecommunications capability,” which is defined as “high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.” Telecommunications Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-104, §706 (c)(1), 110 Stat. 56 (1996). See also 47 U.S.C. §157 note (2001). The FCC filed its Section 706 Report to Congress in 1999 and defined broadband as “the capability of supporting, in both the provider-to-consumer (downstream) and the consumer-to-provider (upstream) directions, a speed (in technical terms, “bandwidth") in excess of 200 kilobits per second (kbps) in the last mile.” 14 FCC Rcd. 2398 at 2406 ¶20 (1999).

See Eli Noam, “The Future of Telecommunications Regulation,” NRRI Quarterly Bulletin 20 (1999): 17; Eli Noam, “Spectrum Auctions: Yesterday's Heresy, Today's Orthodoxy, Tomorrow's Anachronism: Taking the Next Step to Open Spectrum Access,” Journal of Law & Economics 41 (1998): 765; Eli Noam, “Beyond Auctions: Open Spectrum Access,” in Regulators' Revenge: The Future of Telecommunications Deregulation, Tom W. Bell and Solveig Singleton, eds. (Cato Institute, 1998), 1: Eli Noam, “Will Universal Service and Common Carriage Survive the Telecommunications Act of 1996?,” Columbia Law Review 97 (1997): 955; Eli Noam, “Spectrum and Universal Service,” Telecommunications Policy 21 (1997); Eli Noam, “Taking the Next Step Beyond Spectrum Auctions: Open Spectrum Access,” IEEE Communications Magazine 33 (1995): 66 ; Eli Noam, “The Federal-State Friction Built into the 1934 Act and Options for Reform,” in American Regulatory Federalism & Telecommunications Infrastructure, Paul Teske, ed.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

US in Latin America shantytowns and slums in US US pacification of the poor War on Poverty welfare Powell, Colin power generation, alternatives for power, speaking truth to preaching to the choir “preferential option for the poor,” Preston, Julia PRI (Institutional Revolution Party) prisoner’s dilemma prisoners of war prison labor, Chinese prisons privatizing Social Security process patents vs. product patents “profits” now called “jobs,” programmers, Indian Progressive Caucus Progressive Policy Institute progress, signs of, (and not) Prohibition propaganda. See also media corporate doctrinal system producing grassroots media as system for against Social Security for Telecommunications Act of 1996, prophecies, biblical prophets, false and true prosperous few, restless many (quote) prostate cancer protectionism British good or bad in 19th century US patents used for by Reagan administration protest in the US PTA, joining the publications industry public authority, rights guaranteed by public broadcasting.

See neoliberalism students substance abuse Suharto, Thojib Sukarno, Ahmed Super Bowl sweatshops Sweden Sweeney, John tables of contents Taiwan Taking the Risk out of Democracy tape (cassette) revolution tariffs. See protectionism taxation taxes avoided Social Security and tax rates technology. See science and technology telecommunications innovations in public funding for revolution in Telecommunications Act of 1996, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy Telegraph (English newspaper) televisionSee also media; Public Broadcasting System (PBS) Teltsch, Kathleen terror in Central America culture of in El Salvador long-term effect of as news filter US complicity in Tet offensive Thailand Thatcher, Margaret “theologian of the establishment,” Third World.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Chapter 2 The Problematic Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists In 1996, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, John Perry Barlow—a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, onetime cattle rancher, and a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Reacting to the passage in the United States Telecommunications Act of 1996, Barlow channeled the techno-libertarian spirit, writing “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

They kept the governance of the internet in private hands, rather than empowering government decision makers. They deregulated mobile telephone companies and conducted auctions for spectrum space to support the growth of wireless companies that would compete with traditional service providers. And they oversaw the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a watershed moment in the governance of the internet, which laid the foundation for the powerful and problematic technology sector we confront today. At the core of the Telecommunications Act was a distinction between telecommunications services and information services. Such a distinction makes little sense today, as telephones, television, and the internet are virtually indistinguishable from one another.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

There was no vote in Congress on the issue.72 There was no public referendum or discussion. It happened by bureaucratic decree, and Stephen Wolff’s government-funded privatized design of the network made the privatization seem seamless and natural. A year later, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a law that deregulated the telecommunications industry, allowing for the first time since the New Deal nearly unlimited corporate cross-ownership of the media: cable companies, radio stations, film studios, newspapers, phone companies, television broadcasters, and, of course, Internet service providers.73 The law triggered massive consolidation, culminating in just a handful of vertically integrated companies owning the bulk of the American media market.

Lee, “40 Maps That Explain the Internet,” Vox, June 2, 2014, https://www.vox.com/a/internet-maps. 76. Neil Weinberg, “Backbone Bullies,” Forbes, June 12, 2000. The industry would continue to consolidate over the next decade, not just domestically but also internationally. As I write this in 2017, two decades after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed, the US media and telecommunications markets are concentrated in a way that has not been seen for a century: a handful of global, vertically integrated media companies—Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Charter Communications, Time Warner—own most of the domestic media today, including television and radio networks, film studios, newspapers, and, of course, commercial Internet service providers. 77.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Then, new management, new shareholders, or an altogether new and smarter company will rise in its place, like a phoenix from the ashes, to address the unmet or newly articulated needs. What this analysis leaves out is the collateral damage that may have occurred in the meantime. For example, after Big Media successfully lobbied for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the limit on how many radio stations one corporation could own went from forty to no limit at all. Over the next five years, the radio industry consolidated, and Clear Channel Communications emerged as the biggest player, with over 1,200 radio and thirty-nine TV stations. Clear Channel is five times bigger than its closest competitor, and reaches one hundred million listeners daily.

David Siklos, “Changing Its Tune,” The New York Times, September 15, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/business/ media/15radio.html (accessed November 10, 2007). Kristin Thomson, “Media Ownership Fact Sheet,” January 17, 2006, www.futureofmusic.org/articles/ MediaOwnershipfactsheet07.cfm (accessed November 7, 2007). Celia Viggo Wexler, “The Fallout from the Telecommunications Act of 1996: Unintended Consequences and Lessons Learned,” Common Cause Education Fund, May 9, 2005, www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/%7BFB3C17E2 -CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665% 7D/FALLOUT_FROM_THE_TELECOMM_ACT_5-9-05.PDF (accessed November 9, 2007). CHAPTER NINE Here and Now 228 Kiva.org lets donors For more on Kiva.org, visit its site, http://www.kiva.org. 238 One system, called ITEX Mickey Meece, “The Cash Strapped Turn to Barter,” The New York Times, November 13, 2008. 238 There can’t be too much money Thomas H.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

But although so-called “impact litigation” remains a central part of the its operations to this day, as legislators began to ponder how to regulate the ’net, the EFF’s work quickly stretched beyond the courtroom and into the corridors of Washington DC. It was in reaction to the US government’s Telecommunications Act of 1996, which he labelled an “atrocity [that would] place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria”, that John Perry Barlow penned his most famous work, the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The text, which continues to be extensively cited by those wishing to capture the early libertarian idealism of the ’net, begins: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

The digital world encompasses thousands of cable and satellite broadcast channels, 600 million Internet sites, almost a billion Facebook users, and perhaps 70 million bloggers (with more than 50,000 new ones appearing every day), along with storage for all photos, files, programs and all that “big data” in a virtual cloud no longer safely inscribed on our own hard drives. Almost all of these public technologies are privately owned by quasi monopolies. Because the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed in the Clinton years allowed the privatization of all such new media (spectrum abundance supposedly eliminating monopoly and thus the need to regulate media), cities cannot become smart without forging public-private partnerships. Many of the technologies were developed for commercial (for-profit) purposes: multiplying applications can locate pizza parlors and runaway pets or find open parking spaces and pay parking fines.

Google has introduced an intriguing new offering promising participation and exchange (“Hangouts”) but so far it has mainly been an instrument of celebrity interviews. A true digital commons prompting interaction among citizens of different backgrounds and conflicting ideals seems a long ways off. The ideology of market privatization was certified for new media by the Clinton administration with its shocking Telecommunications Act of 1996 (which set aside the 1934 Federal Communications Act that made broadcast media a public utility). The new law declared that spectrum abundance (the seemingly endless availability of bandwidth to everyone and anyone) had made the doctrine of mass communications as a public utility obsolete.


pages: 550 words: 154,725

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

In a long and convoluted letter back—“equally necessary was a versatility and sharing of knowledge for a coherent policy formation in the aggregate,” he wrote in a moment of reminiscence—he seemed mostly intent on revisiting his old intelligence work and recounting its triumphs. He came across as nostalgic for the cold war. What pushed Baker from private regrets about the state of telecommunications to forthright disapproval was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A huge and complex piece of federal legislation, the Telecom Act altered the structure of the communications business by allowing, among other things, the former regional telephone companies (now known as the Baby Bells) to compete nationally with AT&T and MCI. In short order, the 1996 rules created a mad frenzy for telecom equipment and network infrastructure, resulting in absurd stock valuations for some of the companies involved, as well as fraud and malfeasance.

California Institute of Technology archives. 36 John Pierce, My Career as an Engineer: An Autobiographical Sketch (University of Tokyo, 1988). 37 Program notes to the Pierce concert. Pierce Collection, Stanford University archives. 38 William O. Baker, letter to Clark Clifford, April 22, 1991. Baker Collection, Princeton University. 39 On the contrary, the FCC seemed to have clear objectives, even if they weren’t to Baker’s liking. The simply stated goal of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, for instance, was “to let anyone enter any communications business—to let any communications business compete in any market against any other”; http://transition.fcc.gov/telecom.html. 40 William O. Baker, interview with Michael Noll. CHAPTER NINETEEN: INHERITANCE 1 John S. Mayo, “Evolution of the Intelligent Telecommunications Network,” Science 215 (February 12, 1982). 2 John R.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It's hard to imagine any definition of market rationality or efficiency that could explain the funding ofPets.com. But a much grander, and less appreciated, waste of capital occurred in telecommunications in the late 1990s. Given a Ucense to merge or speculate almost without limit by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the industry, blessed by Wall Street, went on one of the great sprees of all time. In the words of former investment banker Nomi Prins, from 1996 through the end of the boom: Wall Street raised $1.3 trillion of telecom debt and sparked a $1.7 trillion merger spree, bagging $15 billion in fees for the effort.


pages: 338 words: 74,302

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

Where there had been, say, a hundred publishers, there were now about thirty. The mergers continued throughout the 1970s AD, decelerated for a little while, and then kicked off again during the 1980s AD. The latter decade introduced a new element: the presence of multinational conglomerates. After the Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 AD, which deregulated rules of ownership, there was a wave of mega-media mergers that extended well beyond publishing. Long before this happened, most of the United States’ major publishers had been bought up by mega-corporations. In the new mergers, publishing was an afterthought. It was garnish on the meal.


pages: 299 words: 83,854

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

Low-income or credit-impaired consumers classified as unworthy of credit are forced into the more expensive prepaid sector. ALTERNATIVE LOCAL TELEPHONE SERVICE Telephone service providers fall into two categories. The first is ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers), telephone companies that already provided local service when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted. The second category is CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers), or companies that began after passage of the telecommunications act and compete with traditional regional local telephone companies, such as the Bell companies and GTE. Consumers who fail a credit check or whose service has been disconnected for nonpayment can opt for alternative prepaid local phone service from CLECs.100 Mary Bradshaw needed telephone service after hers was disconnected by Southwestern Bell for nonpayment.


pages: 290 words: 83,248

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

Drawing on the ideas of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the Chicago School of economists led by Milton Friedman argued that restrictions on trade and business held back growth, heavily influencing the Reagan and subsequent administrations. Deregulation became the order of the day in the 1980s and 1990s. Many industries – airlines, trucking, utilities, energy, banking, telecommunications in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 – were transformed as governments stood back and exposed them to market forces.13 In parallel, following the work of Professor Alfred Rappaport at the North Western University Business School, creating ‘shareholder value’ was elevated above other goals for management. The movement was given added bite by the increasing use of share options to incentivize top executives and they turned to the investment banks to help them grow earnings per share through financial engineering and mergers and acquisitions.14 The combination of a strong economy, deregulation and shareholder value created a mountain of corporate finance work for the investment banks as companies merged, demerged and refinanced themselves.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

Mitch Kapor noted in an April 2012 interview, “Nobody in Washington DC took [the Internet] seriously, so it was allowed to happen. By the time anybody noticed, it had already won.”23 In effect, the Internet was released into the wild in a strong pro-business climate pushed by conservatives who wanted one big institution—government—to get out of free markets. The following year, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the radio spectrum, allowing, among other things, the rise of huge media conglomerates like Clear Channel (paradoxical, I know). The underlying philosophy received memorable expression in a piece written by the technologist, cattle rancher, and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”


pages: 265 words: 79,747

Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life by Gretchen Rubin

A Pattern Language, airport security, Albert Einstein, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Everything should be made as simple as possible, knowledge worker, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, Telecommunications Act of 1996

But so few relics remained from those days: three thick volumes of bound law journals, with “Gretchen A. Craft, Editor-in-Chief” embossed on the spine; Jamie’s massive final paper, “Neighborhood Resistance to Transitional Housing Facilities in New York State”; and our battered copy of the “Communications Act of 1934 as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996” (the size of a paperback novel) from the days when we both worked at the FCC. And we didn’t need anything more. Law was an important part of our past, but it didn’t warrant a shrine. In fact, I got rid of several weighty casebooks that we hadn’t opened in years, and seeing the newly open space on our crowded bookshelves made me very happy.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

See also community sharing; nonprofits; platforms, for-profit; and capitalism, 2, 6, 37–39; and community initiatives, 8; defining, 191–94; environmental impacts, 28, 114–20; as household space, 30; idealist discourse, 5, 11, 21; impacts of, 108–10; and inequality, 96, 104; and labor market, 8; and management, 7; and municipal governments, 172; participant characteristics, 189–90; personal authenticity, 29; rationale for, 115; and social activism, 7, 19; and social relations, 163–64; stranger sharing, 7, 31–32; studies of, 12–13; and technology, 21; and urban problems, 107–8; and work experience, 4 “Sharing Nicely,” 163 Sharing Economy, The, 12 sharing workforce, 43–45, 77, 190 Shauna, 122 Sheldon, Michael, 79 Shift, 170 Shira, 103, 106, 111 short-term rentals, 160 Silicon Valley, 23–24 Simon, Herbert, 79 SitterCity, 27 Skillshare, 127 Slee, Tom, 13, 193 Smart, 170 Smith, Yves, 37 SnapGoods, 34 snobbery, 124, 132–38 social connection, 55, 78, 111–14, 128 social distancing, 113–14 social dumping, 153 social exclusion, 124, 132–41 social isolation, 48 social sharing, 164, 191 Spinlister, 35 Srnicek, Nick, 13 state legislatures, 157–58 statistical discrimination, 84, 89 Stephanie, 21 Stocksy United, 148–49, 164–71, 188, 192 stranger sharing, 7, 31–32, 192 structural inequality, 85, 92 Suhani, 30, 52 Sundararajan, Arun, 11–12, 83 super-platforms, 151 supplemental earners, 49–57, 96, 110; and algorithmic control, 68–70; characteristics of, 72; and financial security, 103–4 Sweden, 153, 173 taking (advantage), 159 Takl, 27 Tamara, 68–69 Tanwen, 51 TaskRabbit, 4–5, 9–10, 21, 35; earnings, 73–74; ease of access, 45–46; employee rights, 161; identity conflicts, 100–101; individual control, 77; origin story, 25; pivot, 74; racial bias, 86–87, 91–92; ratings, 63–64; social connection, 112; supplemental earners, 50–51; tasks, 27; transaction fees, 86; worker experience, 40–41, 52, 58–60 Tawana, 32, 85, 88–89, 174 taxi industry, 97, 109; demise of, 34; and ride-hailing, 102, 156, 161 technical control, 67 technology. See also digital technology: algorithms, 31, 66–70, 169; and counterculture, 22–23; faith in, 21; and idealist discourse, 162; and social change, 23–24, 162, 174; and social connection, 112; and values, 174–75 tech sector, 150–51 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 23 Telles, Rudy, Jr., 192 Thelen, Kathleen, 153 ThredUp, 112 Tim, 168–69 time banks, 125–27, 134–36, 144–46 TimeBanksUSA, 127 TimeRepublik, 8 tips, 65 traffic accidents, 118 tragedy of the commons, 163 trust, 24, 32 Turner, Fred, 21 Turo, 20, 45–46, 107; car owner incomes, 104; environment benefits, 54; income, 73; racial bias, 88–89; renter experience, 53–54 two-sided markets, 31 Tyler, 8, 45, 50, 112 Uber, 2, 9–11, 38, 151; business model, 35–37; decreased earnings, 75–76; education levels, 97; employee classification, 47, 161; European regulation, 152–53; gender discrimination, 87; labor competitor, 59; lobbying, 156–57; network effect, 32; origin story, 25; quiet mode, 114; as sharing economy platform, 193; taking (advantage), 159; traffic congestion, 117; transaction fees, 86; UberPool, 108, 118; worker experience, 58, 62, 76 Uberland, 13 Uber of x, 26, 125 UberPop, 153 Uberworked and Underpaid, 12 unemployment, 3 Union Square Ventures, 171 Up and Go, 170 Upwork, 41 urban sharing, 172 UrbanSitter, 27 used book market, 120 Val, 139 Valeria, 98 value proposition, 124, 143–47 values, 174–75 vehicle miles traveled (VMT), 116 Vinni, 31 Wang, Charley, 38 wealth inequality, 95 Wealth of Networks, The, 163 Wells, Katie, 76 Wengronowitz, Robert, 14, 181–82 Werbach, Adam, 27 Wettlaufer, Brianna, 148–49 What’s Mine Is Yours, 12 What’s Yours Is Mine, 13 “When Your Boss Is an Algorithm,” 66 Whole Earth Catalog, 22 Wikipedia, 164 Will, 53–54 women: discrimination, 87; platform participation, 190; ratings, 92 Wonolo, 110 Wood, Alex, 77 work: and capitalism, 3–4; and corporate culture, 3, 6, 12–13; and digital technology, 1, 6–7; employment classification, 47, 71; and for-profit platforms, 2, 6–11, 13; and labor control, 80; and person-to-person economy, 2; precarious, 70–71 workforce, sharing, 43–45, 77, 190 Woz, 139 xenophobia, 89 Yerdle, 27, 34 Zaarly, 35, 99 Zack, 98 Zelizer, Viviana, 193 Zimmer, John, 25 Zimride, 25 Zipcar, 26, 192 Zysman, John, 194 Founded in 1893, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS publishes bold, progressive books and journals on topics in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

You’ve probably “ported” your phone number if you ever changed mobile carriers, for example. Behind the scenes, porting a phone number from one carrier to another in the United States is extraordinarily messy. The system was hastily put in place by the carriers in 1997, in response to the Telecommunications Act of 1996—and never improved much. It’s generally a manual process of people at carriers going back and forth. And since one carrier is losing business when a number is ported out, they have every incentive to make it difficult and drag their feet. In the very early days, the operationally intensive job of handling phone number ports for customers fell to our first ops hire, Lisa Weitekamp.


pages: 406 words: 88,820

Television disrupted: the transition from network to networked TV by Shelly Palmer

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Golden age of television, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, James Watt: steam engine, Leonard Kleinrock, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, market design, Metcalfe’s law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

Invented by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, this de facto UNIX standard is the protocol of the Internet and has become the global standard for communications. Copyright © 2006, Shelly Palmer. All rights reserved. 13-Television.Glossary v2.qxd 3/20/06 7:29 AM Page 215 Symmetrical Digital Subscriber Line – URL 215 Telecommunications Act Of 1996 U.S. Legislation passed in 1996, which over- hauled the telecommunications industry. This bill also put in place important deadlines for the digital transition affecting every commercial and public TV broadcaster in the country. Terrestrial Broadcasting analog or digital signal via a large antenna that stands on the ground.


Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang

affirmative action, back-to-the-land, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, East Village, Howard Zinn, Lao Tzu, rent control, Telecommunications Act of 1996, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city

I know I’m being ignorant and stereotyping, but for real, the BLSA and MLSA always understood from jump when I mentioned how programming should talk about social issues and not just jobs. I ended up organizing a panel that brought Jeru the Damaja and Professor Akilah Folami to speak about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and its impact on hip-hop, radio, and Internet freedom. I also invited Lawyers of Color to come back and talk to us about office politics. After my first summer as an associate, I had stories about uncomfortable situations where people would say culturally insensitive shit that I would usually womp somebody in the face for.


pages: 306 words: 97,211

Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond by Bruce C. N. Greenwald, Judd Kahn, Paul D. Sonkin, Michael van Biema

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, business logic, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, naked short selling, new economy, place-making, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, Telecommunications Act of 1996, time value of money, tulip mania, Y2K, zero-sum game

Even in the most free market of countries, governments cast enormous shadows over the economy and the companies operating within it. Changes in laws, regulations, and tax rulings, as well as other administrative decisions like monetary pol icy and contracting standards-all of these can alter the rules and modify the rewards that shape business decisions. The passing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has allowed new entrants to compete against the incumbent local exchange carriers in their local markets. Various additional pieces of legislation, along with judicial and regulatory decisions, have promoted the radical restructuring of the telecommunications industry in both the United States and abroad.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Plenty of activists wanted information to be free so they’d have an easier time selling computers, Internet access, or online advertising. Some of the rhetoric was far more radical. In February 1996, the Grateful Dead lyricist turned digital activist John Perry Barlow published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”19 Barlow was reacting to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which had plenty of faults. But he came up with one of the more overblown manifestos in the history of the Internet, which is no small distinction: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

The average revenue per minute of AT&T’s switched services declined by 62 percent between 1984 and 1996, and as more competitors entered the market, its market share fell from above 80 percent in 1984 to about 50 percent in 1996, to the clear benefit of US households. As in the case of airlines, however, later policies have been less successful. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was intended to foster competition but also led to a merger wave. We will discuss mergers in Chapter 5, the lobbying activities of telecommunications firms in Chapter 9, and the revolving door issues at the Federal Communications Commission in Chapter 10. These two examples of air travel and telecommunication illustrate three important characteristics of competition policy at that time, all of which we will revisit often in this book.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

., AND LORIL GOSSETT. 2015. “Concealing Communities within the Crowd: Hiding Organizational Identities and Brokering Member Identifications of the Yelp Elite Squad.” Management Communication Quarterly 29 (4): 616–41. AUFDERHEIDE, PATRICIA. 1999. Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996. New York: Guilford. BAKARDJIEVA, MARIA. 2009. “Subactivism: Lifeworld and Politics in the Age of the Internet.” Information Society 25 (2): 91–104. BAKIOGLU, B. S. 2016. “Exposing Convergence: YouTube, Fan Labour, and Anxiety of Cultural Production in Lonelygirl15.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Back then, one of the triggers for the creation of the dot-com bubble was the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which lowered the top marginal capital gains tax rate in the United States from 28 percent to 20 percent, and in turn made more people more interested in becoming speculative investors. Fed chair Alan Greenspan had actually encouraged this by talking up stock valuations, but that would, ironically, only help facilitate what he himself called “irrational exuberance” in the market. All of it was made possible in some senses by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and other pro–Big Tech laws that allowed Internet firms to avoid many of the pesky regulations that other companies had to deal with. It was around this time that I got my own opportunity to jump on the dot-com bandwagon, as—no, I’m not joking—a venture capitalist myself. The fact that a bunch of millionaire investors were willing to hire a journalist who’d never worked in either technology or finance to scout “pan-European B2C media deals”—meaning “business to consumer” for those who don’t remember the jargon of those days—and give her a six-figure salary and thousands of stock options to do so was clearly the sign of a market top.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

There was the 1995 legislation weakening OSHA, an agency despised by the business community, which was substantially written by a group of industry lobbyists.43 There was the two-day get-together between House Republicans and media company CEOs, after which the various broadcasters and publishers were asked to replace their Democratic lobbyists with Republicans; the Telecommunications Act of 1996, almost certainly written by industry lobbyists, followed soon afterward, deregulating the airwaves and trailing clouds of glorious profits for the media companies.44 There was Tom DeLay’s “Project Relief,” a bill that shot down numerous workplace and environmental regulations and that was actually drafted by a team of lobbyists representing some 350 different industries; as the bill went to the floor the lobbyists set up a field command in a room off the House chamber, where they responded to challenges and reassured the wavering.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Finally, data and social graph portability alone may not be enough to ensure competition. The ability to process such data requires systems that scale. Any solution that enables scalable alternatives to market leaders will need not only to make the data available but also to make the systems that can process that data available. Such access is not unprecedented. The U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 provides new entrants unbundled access to elements of the telecommunications infrastructure, such as telephone lines or switches, owned and operated by existing telecommunications companies, at a regulated rate. While this levels the playing field for new entrants to compete with incumbents, it may also reduce an incumbent’s incentive to invest in the infrastructure itself.


pages: 506 words: 146,607

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market by Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, George Gilder, high net worth, informal economy, junk bonds, margin call, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, Michael Milken, new economy, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Telecommunications Act of 1996, thinkpad, traveling salesman, undersea cable, UUNET

See rating categories Strong Buy rating (CSFB system) Strumingher, Eric Sudikoff, Jeffrey Sullivan, Scott congressional hearings and prison sentence of WorldCom’s sham finances and swaps Szeliga, Robin Taubman, Paul Taylor, Elizabeth technology companies bubble burst and IPO boom and Vortex Conference and Telecom Cafe telecom industry bubble in bursting of bubble in competition and consolidations and as deal center decline of deregulation and eleven major companies in Grubman as face of Internet’s effect on last hurrah for mergers in. See mergers and acquisitions momentum in revenue inflation by Salomon’s dominance in September 11 attacks and significance of Qwest’s entrance into technology cross-fertilization with turning point for watershed year for See also specific companies Telecommunications Act of 1996 Tele-Communications International Telefonica de España Telefonica del Peru Teleport Communications MFS secondary offering and Teligent Telstra Tempest, Drake terminal multiple Thakore, Nick 3Com TIAA–CREF Time Warner T-Mobile Toole, Dick tracking stock Travelers Corporation T.


pages: 863 words: 159,091

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Eighth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers by Kate L. Turabian

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, illegal immigration, information security, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two and twenty, W. E. B. Du Bois, yellow journalism, Zeno's paradox

Code, or both; cite specific provisions by section (preceded by a section symbol and a space) and, in Statutes, by page. Cite statutes in notes only; you do not need to include them in your bibliography. Notice the form for a shortened note, which differs from the usual pattern (see 16.4.1). N: 18. Atomic Energy Act of 1946, Public Law 585, 79th Cong., 2d sess. (August 1, 1946), 12, 19. 19. Telecommunications Act of 1996, Public Law 104–104, U.S. Statutes at Large 110 (1996): 56. 25. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, Public Law 91–190, § 102, U.S. Statutes at Large 83 (1970): 853, codified at U.S. Code 42 (2000), § 4332. 27. National Environmental Policy Act, § 103. Before 1874, laws were published in the seventeen-volume Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 1789–1873.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Wireless Future Working Paper No. 17, Feb. 2007), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=962027; Petition to Confirm a Consumer’s Right to Use Internet Communications Software and Attach Devices to Wireless Networks, supra note 10. For a description of Steve Jobs’s claim of safety as a reason for the iPhone to remain tethered, see Katie Hafner, Altered iPhones Freeze Up, N.Y. TIMES, Sep. 29, 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/technology/29iphone.html. 28. The U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 sought to create a market in third-party cable boxes, but these boxes would not be able to make use of the cable network to provide independent services—and even allowing third-party vendors to provide boxes functionally identical to the ones offered by the cable companies has proven difficult, as the Federal Communications Commission has tried to balance cable company requests for delays with a desire to implement competition.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

   — ambassador to the United Nations, 116, 156    — civil rights and, 42–43, 63, 66    — Cuban Missile Crisis, 156, 157, 161    — death, 217–18, 370n    — demagoguery and, 19–20    — Democratic nomination in 1956, 64–65    — McCarthy and, 19, 22    — Nixon and, 22, 102    — opposition to political advertising, 15, 20, 21, 22, 43, 65    — presidential election of 1952, 18–19, 20–21, 22–23, 24–25, 308    — presidential election of 1956, 41–46, 62–66, 103, 115    — presidential election of 1960 and, 102–4, 105, 108–11, 112–15 Stompanato, Johnny, 89 Stranger, The (film), 54 Strategic Hamlet Program, 227–28, 241, 247, 295 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 195, 199 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 199, 242, 276, 286, 292, 295, 296–97, 299 surveillance of Americans involved in protests, 305, 307, 315 Taft, Robert, 16–17 Taft, William, 16 Tan Son Nhut airbase, Vietnam, 206, 229 teach-ins, 199–200, 225, 234, 251, 292, 294 Technologies of Freedom (Pool), 316, 317, 318 Technologies Without Boundaries (Pool), 318 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 319 Tet Offensive, 267, 303 Theft, A (Bellow), 56, 58–59, 344n Things They Carried, The (Tim O’Brien), 238 Thomas, Dylan, 271 Thousand Days, A (Schlesinger), 177, 182 Thurmond, Strom, 75 time-sharing systems, 170, 172, 296 Tin Men, The (Frayn), 97 Toward the Year 2018, 278 Trotsky, Leon, 53 Truman, Harry S


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

Meanwhile, governments the world over are doing everything possible to close the Pandora’s Box of freedom the Net has created. It’s getting pretty ugly out there. Our troubles are only a small part of the story. Sure, we’ve never faced this kind of corporate venom before. But when things like the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Digital Telephony, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and “anti-cybersquatting” bills win easy passage, it’s inevitable. The Internet, once the shining beacon of free speech, cultural exchange, and open expression is fast becoming the exclusive property of big business and oppressive regimes.

Military, 627–628 CampusWide, 604–612 catching my cheating girlfriend, 637–639 circumventing DOD’s SmartFilter, 628–630 examining student databases, 602–604 FirstClass hacking, 615–618 future of computing, 642–644 getting busted military style, 619–625 hacker goes to Iraq, 618–619 ISP story, 648–650 looking back, 640–641 making of pseudo-felon, 630–634 observing lottery, 646–648 overview of, 601 ParadisePoker.com blackjack, 644–646 school ID numbers, 614–615 university of insecurity, 612–614 warning from caught uncapper, 634–636 strobe light, Chrome Box, 324 Strowger system, step office, 51–52 Student Database story, 602–604 Student ID stories CampusWide cards, 606–607 FirstClass hacking, 615–618 fun with numbers, 614–615 student databases, 602–604 university of insecurity, 612–614 stunts, teleconferencing, 80–81 subcarrier transmitters, 356 subdirectories, and viruses, 291 Subscriber Identity Module. see SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards success, threat of, 268–271 Summercon, 512 Sun Microsystems, 549 Superpages, 748 Supervisory Audio Tone (SAT), cell phones, 427–428 support.dell.com, 699 surreptitious interception, 98 surveillance, Soviet Union, 683 surveillance devices, 349–362 carrier current devices, 356–357 Digital Telephony Bill, 559–561 hardwired room microphones, 351–352 infinity transmitters, 357–358 long-range listening devices, 350 miniature tape recorders, 361–362 reasons to learn, 349 slaves and loop extenders, 358–359 takeover of nation’s phone system, 559–561 telephone traps and transmitters, 359–360 through-wall listening devices, 350–351 transmitters (bugs), 352–356 in twenty-first century, 683–686 SVAPI (Speaker-Verification API) standard, 811 SWAGIMA, 66 swap files, 286 Swisscom, 434 switches Afghan phone system, 658 GSM, 431–432 long-distance, 67 satellite TV, 763 switching centers, 45–46 step switching and, 50 SWR (standing wave ratio) meter, 760 SYSNAM privilege, VMS systems, 132 Sysops charges against Private Sector BBS, 194–197 protecting themselves, 192–194 SYSTAT (SY), 124–125, 128 SYSTEM accounts, VMS systems, 131 System ID (System ID), 108 SystemOne software, 769 T T (tip) telephone wires, 24 “table ready” signal, 723–724 Takedown (film) fabrications in, 249–252 “Free Kevin” campaign, 252–253 865 94192bindex.qxd 6/3/08 3:29 PM Page 866 866 Index overview of, 250–253 re-writing of screenplay, 235, 254–255 Talk Cents, 484 Talkabout, 89 Talking Greeting Card, hacking, 339 tandem, 490 TAP publication, 229–230 phreakers and, 23 tapping modem lines, 136 TAPR (Tucson Amateur Packet Radio), 368–369 taps keyboard, 383 telephone, 359–360 Target, credit card fraud, 708–709 TASI (Time Assignment Speech Interpolation), 189–190 TCAP (Transaction Capabilities Application Part), 432 Tcimpidis, Tom, 211–213 TCP RST (reset connection), China’s Internet, 803–804 TCP/IP protocol, 148–149, 151–152, 771 TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) frames, GSM, 431, 432 tech support Answers for Gateway, 729–730 Dell, 697–699 technology, 574 addressing side-effects of, 552 corporations scared by new, 581 hackers vs. criminals, 553–554 positive developments towards, 596–599 restrictions on new, 565 teenagers, Secret Service raids on, 198–200 telecommunications and fraud, 221–223 privacy and, 115–116 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 581 telecommunications toys, 1980s 800 number allocation, 92–93 Airfone, 93 catching phone phreaks, 109–112 cellular phone companies, 92 cellular phones, fraud, 103–108 cellular phones, fraud bust, 97–98 cellular phones, how they work, 85–89 cellular phones, phreaking, 91–92 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 98–100 equal access, 93–97 forbidden frequencies, 100–101 IBM audio distribution systems, 69–71 long distance, 66–69 Ma Bell breakup, 71–73 overview of, 65–66 paging for free, 101–102 phone choices, 89–92 Radio Shack PRO-2004 scanner, 100–101 results of divesture, 82–85 scanning for calls, 116–118 telecom informer, 113–116 teleconferences, 76–82 Travelnet, 73–76 telecommunications toys, 21st century, 732–830 31337SP34K, 816–817 3D glasses, 812–816 802.11b networks, 733–739 biometrics, 809–812 Captivate networks, 743–744 elections, 805–809 electronic message centers, 768–772 firewall of China, 801–805 genome, 820–824 Google AdWords, 795–801 honeypots, 818–820 lock picks, 777–780 lottery, 780–785 Mercedes Benz with universal remote, 772 NCR ATMs, 765–768 neighbors’ networks, 739–743 New York’s MTA. see New York’s MTA overview of, 732 pirate radio primer, 758–761 real electronic brain implantation enhancement, 824–828 remote secrets, 773–777 RFID, 749–751 satellite TV broadcasts, 761–765 social engineering and pretexts, 828–830 WAP, 747–749 WiFi and MITM, 744–746 XM Radio, 753–758 teleconferences, 7, 11–15 teleconferences, running successful, 76–82 conference controls, 78–79 conference numbers, 76–78 dangers, 79 other conferences, 81 94192bindex.qxd 6/3/08 3:29 PM Page 867 Index overview of, 76–77 stunts, 80–81 Telemail. see GTE Telemail Telemetrac, 436 Telemetry, 435 Telephone Exchange Name Project, 485 telephone line surveillance devices carrier current devices, 357 infinity transmitters, 357–358 microphones, 352 slaves and loop extenders, 358–359 taps and transmitters, 359–360 telephones making of pseudo-felon, 630–634 traps and transmitters, 359–360 telephones, in 1990s, 421–490 area code system, 486–487 Caller ID, 458–463 COCOTs. see COCOTs (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones) long-distance charges, 487–490 MCI gimmicks, 463–464 mega-mergers, 482 naming exchanges, 484–486 overview of, 421–422 pay phones, 482–483 phone rates, 483–484, 487 phreaking in the nineties, 466–472 privacy hole, 464–466 special call numbers, 483 toll fraud, 478–481 voicemail hacking, 472–478 wireless. see wireless communications telephones, in 21st century, 651–689 in Afghanistan, 657–659 ANI and Caller ID spoofing, 664–669 answering machine hacking, 659–662 backspoofing, 672–675 future of enhanced 911, 681–683 getting more from T-Mobile, 675–679 hacking three holed pay phones, 652–655 idiocy in the Telcos, 655–657 surveillance in twenty-first century, 683–686 tracking any U.K.


pages: 721 words: 197,134

Data Mining: Concepts, Models, Methods, and Algorithms by Mehmed Kantardzić

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, backpropagation, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, discrete time, El Camino Real, fault tolerance, finite state, Gini coefficient, information retrieval, Internet Archive, inventory management, iterative process, knowledge worker, linked data, loose coupling, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, phenotype, random walk, RFID, semantic web, speech recognition, statistical model, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, text mining, traveling salesman, web application

B.2 DATA MINING FOR THE TELECOMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY The telecommunication industry has quickly evolved from offering local and long-distance telephone services to providing many other comprehensive communication services including voice, fax, pager, cellular phone, images, e-mail, computer, and Web-data transmission, and other data traffic. The integration of telecommunications, computer networks, Internet, and numerous others means of communication and computing is under way. The U.S. Telecommunication Act of 1996 allowed Regional Bell Operating Companies to enter the long-distance market as well as offer “cable-like” services. The European Liberalization of Telecommunications Services has been effective from the beginning of 1998. Besides deregulation, there has been a sale by the FCC of airwaves to companies pioneering new ways to communicate.


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

He also learned the telecommunications business in detail. Eight years later, he left to join the brokerage firm Paine Webber as an analyst. The telecom industry was almost as exciting in these years as the dot-coms. As the rapidly expanding Internet required that America and the rest of the world be wired, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the telephone industry, allowing local phone companies, the survivors of the long-ago AT&T breakup, to compete in the long-distance market once reserved for AT&T alone. Grubman understood the industry and the new trends as thoroughly as anyone on Wall Street. Always hardworking, Grubman early on developed a reputation for honesty when he downgraded AT&T as it faced new competition.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

All of these groups, and the people they represented—the homeless, the struggling mothers, the families unable to pay their bills, the 40 million without health insurance and the many more with inadequate insurance—were facing an enormous barrier of silence in the national culture. Their lives, their plight was not being reported in the major media, and so the myth of a prosperous America, proclaimed by powerful people in Washington and Wall Street, persisted. There were valiant attempts to break through the control of information, especially after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which enabled the handful of corporations dominating the airwaves to expand their power further. Mergers enabled tighter control of information. Two gigantic media corporations, CBS and Viacom, joined in a $37 billion deal. The Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano commented: “Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few.”


pages: 1,631 words: 468,342

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson

biofilm, Boeing 747, Broken windows theory, clean water, deskilling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Jacquard loom, Own Your Own Home, sensible shoes, spice trade, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer

Only four percent of black preschooler deaths derived from drowning; fifty-five percent of white preschooler deaths were drownings. page 740. 2. Underwriters Laboratories, “Home Safety and Inspection Checklist” (1996). Chapter 66. Understanding Your Castle page 777. 1. One provision of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 was declared unconstitutional in 1996 by the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in a decision affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997. The provision that was struck was also intended to deal with signal bleed. It would have required cable operators to scramble or block any indecent or sexually oriented programming on any channel devoted primarily to sexually oriented programming, so that it could not be received by anyone who did not subscribe to it.