NetPolicy.com: Public Agenda for a Digital World [Paperback]

Leslie David Simon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 2000

In NetPolicy.Com, Leslie David Simon offers a panoramic view of the Internet's cyclonic effects on national and global institutions, ranging from government and finance to health care, education and industry. To cope with this digital revolution, the author provides a comprehensive prescription for crucial public policy needs. Beginning with the worldwide struggle between government control and private sector leadership of the Net, he looks at the basic properties of the Net: its disregard of national boundaries; its virtual nature; and its impacts on the global economy, democracy, money, power, ecology, and culture. The book asks how we can encourage the healthy growth of the Net and avoid its darker side effects. Examining the current approaches of numerous governments and international organizations, NetPolicy.Com covers such critical issues as privacy, free expression, access, international trade, security, taxation, telecommunications regulation, legal frameworks, and government research.

NetPolicy.Com takes a non-ideological view, examining each issue on its own merits, sometimes accepting government involvement, as with advanced research, and sometimes favoring private sector control, as in the book's call for an end to telecommunications regulation or its opposition to government censorship. Above all, the book asserts that the unique American embrace of free expression, open markets, and private initiative will keep the U.S. in the vanguard of cyberspace, provided the private sector acts responsibly. Closed, non-democratic societies, the author asserts, will fall ever further behind, economically, politically, and culturally.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Perhaps as complicated as the bits and bytes that constitute the Internet are the public policy questions it raises. Simon--a senior policy scholar at the Wilson Center and a State Department consultant on international communications and information policy--seeks to clarify the nature of those questions and propose some answers. He opens (part 1) with definitions, a brief Internet history, and a discussion of the nature of the challenges it poses; beyond simple "convergence" between computers and telecommunications, Simon stresses "megaconvergence" (the Internet's transforming impact on how businesses and governments do their work). Part 2 considers five types of public policy issues: digital democracy, digital economics, technical regulatory issues, legal concerns, and research and development policies. Part 3 takes on governance questions: how the U.S., other nations, international organizations, and the private sector have tried to address the public policy questions. Simon closes with suggestions on how to set priorities among the policy challenges cyberspace presents. Not an easy read but a valuable resource on critical policy issues. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

A valuable resource on critical policy issues.

(Booklist )

Simon's analysis contains a series of recommendations for digital policies that retain a balance between public and private sector roles in cyberspace.

(Steven Puro Perspectives on Political Science )

For people unfamiliar with the many issues involved with policies regarding the new communications technologies, this will prove a reasonably valuable introduction.

(Choice )

Appears to be the definitive overview of Net policy issues.

(Future Survey )

This is a very ambitious book, more an encyclopedia of the Internet than anything else. It is filled with valuable information not collected in any one place before and very up to date. The style is clear and accessible; the organization is logical. It is generally well documented.

(Lewis M. Branscomb, Principal Investigator, Harvard Information Infrastructure Project, Harvard University )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press (October 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930365039
• ISBN-13: 978-1930365032
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,791,578 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Policies for an Interconnected World, December 28, 2000

By 

"thorton30" - See all my reviews

This review is from: NetPolicy.com: Public Agenda for a Digital World (Paperback)

This book is both scholarly and entertaining, for it describes the history, influence, and possible future of today's most fascinating tool, the Net, and does so through the lens of a person whose career was focused first on telecommunications and later on computers. Just as these have come together in the Internet and elsewhere, so does this story, which for Simon began in 1966. The Net itself is now over a quarter-century old, but for its first two decades was largely ignored by the public. Since 1995, however, an exponential growth in popular and commercial interest has created a similar, and continuing, explosion of the Net. It is difficult to think of any earlier technological development whose adoption occurred so rapidly or with such ease. And unlike most high-tech inventions, the Net developed organically, independent of any master plan or architecure, absent of security considerations or privacy concerns, hardly shaped at all by economic factors. Sharing was, and remains, its goal. Today, however, the Net impacts our everyday life and has become an enabler for business to expand its markets. It is hence now entrusted with private information of individuals and secret proprietary data of business, whose security may be essential to commercial survival. Ubiquitous as it is, the Net cries out for public, and private, policies that address such troublesome issues as equitable access,taxation, intellectual property rights, content regulation, privacy, security, first-amendment rights, and many others.

NetPolicy.Com defines the Net and its impacts and discusses "the bearable lightness of the digital world," the convergence not only within electronics, but the mega-convergence of businesses, e.g., financial services, commerce, and industry. It identifies difficult policy issues and their legal framework and suggests appropriate roles for the public and private sectors. Despite the importance of the Net to business and government, its essential issues have most to do with its potential effects on humankind.

We are reminded of the 1998 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, largely drawn from the French Declaration of Human Rights and our Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, quoting from the former document the freedom to "seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Would that today's policy makers have the prescience of the author of those words!

NetPolicy.Com is recommended for readers with intellectual curiosity, anyone interested in modern technology, observers of contemporary customs, any person who surfs the Net or sends e-mail, indeed for all responsible citizens who wish to learn more about this new world in which we live, interdependent on each other and literally interconnected to everyone else.

Finally, NetPolicy.Com's technical title disguises a book that is an easy and important read.

5.0 out of 5 stars An important title for any social issues class, May 19, 2001

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: NetPolicy.com: Public Agenda for a Digital World (Paperback)

From how digital commerce and democracy affects taxation, privacy and free speech to legal platforms for protecting and regulating property rights and documents online, Netpolicy.com provides a social examination of how the internet's capabilities are creating new public agendas for change. An important title for any social issues class.