Media

In 2009, a bipartisan Knight Commission found that while the broadband age is enabling an information and communications renaissance, local communities in particular are being unevenly served with critical information about local issues. Soon after the Knight Commission delivered its findings, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiated a working group to identify crosscurrents and trends, and make recommendations on how the information needs of communities can be met in a broadband world.

This article discusses the underlying dynamics behind the present debate over net-neutrality, analyzes the pro's and con's, concludes that the debate is based on false premises, and proposes a better solution — end-user sovereignty — that is both open and only lightly regulated.

In July 2007, Scripps Networks acquired Recipezaar, a user-generated recipe and cooking Website with a captive community of 2.3 million visitors. By September, Deanna Brown, president of Scripps Networks Digital, grappled with how to best integrate the recent acquisition into Scripps Networks Digital and its affiliated Website, FoodNetwork.com. Should monetization efforts trump the interests and aesthetic tastes of Recipezaar's members? Would restructuring the Recipezaar team dampen the enthusiasm of its five crucial employees and adversely affect the community they had built?

I use uniquely comprehensive data on financial news events to test four predictions from an asymmetric information model of a firm's stock price. Certain investors trade on information before it becomes public; then, public news levels the playing field for other investors, increasing their willingness to accommodate a persistent liquidity shock. Empirically, I measure public information using firms' stock returns on news days in the Dow Jones archive. I find four patterns in postnews returns and trading volume that are consistent with the asymmetric information model's predictions.

As the world becomes interconnected, the interest in comparisons among countries has grown. A veritable cottage industry of comparison-spewing institutions has emerged, this author not excepted. Who of the 195?plus sovereign nations on this planet is the most democratic? The happiest? The most innovative? The most electronically connected? No problem, lists exist for everything.

It's become conventional wisdom in academia, politics, and the press that America has fallen behind in electronic communications. Where once America ruled supreme, bestowing the internet on the world, it is now an also-ran. Whether in broadband internet or in mobile communications, America is barely edging out Slovenia. This may have been true for a brief period, but is it still true? And why is this story line taken up with such relish?

Eighteen months ago, candidate Obama argued in his campaign that America had lost its leadership in the world of the broadband internet. Late last month, the Federal Communications Commission delivered to Congress a 360-page plan to change all that.