Customer Reviews

The New Information Infrastructure: Strategies for U.S. Policy (A Twentieth Century Fund Book)

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I'll admit at the outset of this review that I did not read this whole book, so I cannot speak for it in its entirety. Despite that I want to offer my opinion on what I read because it was very useful to me academically. This book is an excellent compilation of contributions from scholars. All the contributors are to a degree prominent and the book mainly deals with telecommunications policy.

I purchased it specifically as a reference for my dissertation. I was interested in two chapters from this book that dealt with international telecommunications policy and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). These two chapters were contributed by Cowhey and Rutkowski and proved to be very useful to me. Finding pedagogically sound reference material on the ITU is very difficult and these contributions proved to be a goldmine.

Both contributions deal with recent (1990s) changes to the ITU. In addition, these two contributions provide a greater fidelity to the material I've been able to find to date on the ITU. For example, Rutkowski explains how the ITU's origins in the postal ministries of late 1880s Europe can help explain why it is such a stagnate organization in the face of dynamic technological and market change today.