Dear JIP reader,
This Special Section of the JIP celebrates the 50th anniversary of a gathering of communications professionals, regulators, and researchers first held in 1972, convened by the Office of Telecommunications Policy in The White House, and originally called the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, subsequently renamed TPRC, and currently called TPRC—The Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy. The name changes reflect the ways in which the Conference has evolved and expanded.
With 50 years of history of engaging policy makers with the best and most current research available on topics of importance to policy, legislation, and regulation behind it, the Editors believed that it would be a good time to look ahead to the next 50 years. Accordingly, they invited a group of experienced TPRC participants to reflect on the question, what will be the role of TPRC for the next 50 years? The authors were given no further direction and encouraged to reach out on whatever aspect best fit with their own experience and expertise. The authors are, in alphabetical order:
Erik Bohlin, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Philip Napoli, Duke University
Prabir Neogi, Independent Consultant
Sharon Strover, The University of Texas at Austin
Irene Wu, Georgetown University
This diverse group collectively represents expertise and experience in policy, economics, regulation, government, international issues, and civil society. Each has provided his or her unique take on the question that was posed. Aspects of technology and law are interwoven with each of their areas, as are larger questions of the public interest and of the ethics and norms of the field. We hope you enjoy their takes on the next 50 years of TPRC.
Thank you for being a JIP reader, and please consider us as you prepare to submit your next article for publication.
Sincerely, the JIP Co-Editors,
Krishna Jayakar, Penn State University
Amit Schejter, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Oranim College, Visiting Prof. Penn State University
Richard Taylor, Penn State University Emeritus
The Role of TPRC for the Next 50 Years
This is an ambitious topic and a challenge to reflect on, and many questions surface immediately. Will there be a TPRC still standing? What will be the main research agendas? How will the community around TPRC look like? How will the policy arena look like where TPRC aims to contribute? Certainly, more questions can be asked, and I will just touch on a few issues.
As a starting point, I assume that TPRC will still be alive and kicking in 50 years. There are many societies and conference series that had successful and important developments but somehow got lost and dissolved—what happened, for instance, with World Future Society (WFS), International Council for Computer Communications (ICCC), European Communication Policy Research Conference (Euro-CPR), Conference on Telecommunication and Techno-Economics (CTTE), and International Conference on Mobile Business (ICMB) to name a few? All of these had a stream of successful conferences, but they are not convened any more. Certainly, it is easy to overestimate the likelihood of long-term survival when all is going well, but just a few financial shocks to an otherwise healthy nonprofit society can put an end to the whole series of events. Let us hope that the TPRC management can weather future financial storms and peril and survive, as has been done for the last 50 years!
Moving on to research agendas, what will fill our minds in 50 years? As another starting point, it seems a safe bet that innovation in the broad group of information and communication technologies (ICT) will still be around. Despite many worries that the famous Moore’s Law will be attenuated and be less important, this law is still making impacts. Moreover, the broad field of ICT is growing as well through quantum, nano, and artificial intelligence grows to prominence. It seems a safe bet that confluence, convergence, combinations, and diversification between several subtechnologies within the ICT field will generate many important innovations to come. It seems a safe assumption that the ICT field will be an active source of dynamism, change, and relevance for the next 50 years.
Having passed the threshold whether ICT in its broad terms will still be around in 50 years, the next question is what will be the main issues of concern, and main focal points? Among all the potential research issues that has been traditionally covered by the TPRC community, what will be dominant ones and what will be driving forces to generate new and important findings, relevant for policy makers? Out of which research interests that have been part of the TPRC agenda, which ones will be primarily on our minds 50 years hence? Perhaps, some issues that are less frequent at TPRC will become central in 50 years, and some issues that are central now will be minor issues then?
In my speculation of future research issues, I fall back on an earlier and fulfilling experience in future watching and foresight engagement. It feels safe to go back to some personal roots to address such a far-reaching and consequential perspective! For about 1.5 years (1998–1999), I had the pleasure to be Visiting Scientist at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), a branch of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC). The JRC was (and is) formally a Directorate General of the European Commission, and the only research arm of the large and multifaceted European Commission (EC). The JRC developed step by step, with one of its original research facilities in Ispra (Italy) being part of the earlier Euratom collaboration. The IPTS was established in Sevilla (Spain) after the World Expo 1992 and experienced a sprawling growth phase in the late 90s with a lot of young staff with high ambitions and energy.
In that context, an ambitious project supported by EC’s Fourth Framework Research Program was brought to IPTS. The project was named Alliance for a Sustainable Information Society (ASIS) and had very ambitious goals. Primarily, the project sought to link the development of a sustainable society in interaction with the parallel development of an information society. To that end, research was explored on the causal links between sustainable development and information society to identify the mutual interdependence between sustainability and the information society. As a starting point, the information society held promises to influence societal development in a more sustainable fashion, where sustainability was conceived in its widest sense, encompassing environment, social dimension, economy, and even culture. The project identified as well countervailing forces within the information society, creating potential backlash, rebound, and boomerang effects. Achieving more sustainability simply by investing more in ICT did not seem feasible. In addition, the project pursued practical action in terms of an alliance of members, declarations, workshops, conferences, and a memorandum of understanding. The project drew inspiration from the writings of the Club of Rome that in the 1970s identified and elaborated on the limits to growth, from both simulations and engagement with society. The project was active between 1998 and 1999, and basic information of the project is still available on the web at the time of writing.1
Moreover, the project embedded the concern of a sustainable information society in a global context, especially considering the then emerging new world order, replacing the cold war era with a new era to be defined. This new global context was of high interest for the project, and speculation was rife with how the EU would fare in relation to a possibly more unified global context based on a Pax Americana versus a more multipolar global context, where competing centers of influence were exercising control and influence. The project drew inspiration from writings in Foreign Affairs on what the future geopolitical landscape would look like, and tried to define a particular European Way that would deal with information society and sustainability in a comparative better way than competing geopolitical interests. (Remember though that this was in the 1998–1999 time frame, well before 9/11 and its global repercussions.)
The reason why I fall back on this tripartite division of fundamental concerns is that since the late 1990s and onward today, I think there is a general agreement that sustainability has risen to be an absolutely vital and strategic agenda. Concurrently, the various aspects of the information society (or nowadays, the preferred term is perhaps digitalization) is also increasingly a vital issue. And likewise, concerns about the geopolitical landscape have not diminished but become a heightened concern over the last two decades.
My expectation is simply that this tripartite relationship will become even more important over the next decades and become an integral part of the TPRC debates and concerns. There are needs for new tools and analyses for understanding the causal links between information society and sustainability. There is a need to put sustainability and information society concerns as part of a geopolitical agenda. Simply put, regions that will not address sustainability will suffer in the long term, and disregard for sustainability will not just be a negative externality to other regions, but will be detrimental to its own population and growth prospects. Sustainability, notably climate change, will infuse an increased need for dialogue and discussion on relationships between governments, economic interests, and conflict zones. The economic consequences of both sustainability and information society impacts will be increasingly important for prosperity and well-being. Research cannot leave these matters only to policy makers.
However, there are several challenges to overcome for such a wide research agenda, and it may be of course that few articles are able to address this complex. Rather, it will be more precisely defined articles, and articles reaching out to intellectual domains that are not so often available presently at TPRC. The scope of discourse is though expected to be widened, as the challenges of climate change and geopolitical developments seems unlikely to abate or diminish. Rather, a prediction that climate change and geopolitics will increase in importance over the next 50 years seems a safe prediction!
As an example of the challenges though with such a wide remit of articles is to reflect on what is going on in established journals that typically accept various TPRC articles currently. Speaking from my own experience, as the editor of the Journal of Telecommunications Policy, there have been several articles submitted that address the impact of ICT on energy, or sustainability more broadly. Typically, these articles suffer from very complex causal considerations and sometimes grand overestimations. However, there are relatively few reviewers that would respond to review articles that address the ICT versus sustainability complex. The reviewers are few because on the one hand, reviewers have often a kind of preference to review in journals where they share some familiarity and authorship, and on the other hand, there are relatively few reviewers that are able to bridge both fields, as authors. Without reviewers, there are few ways forward for an article in a double-blind journal. So, then the choice is to refer the authors to journals that have, for instance, a greater competency in one of the fields of sustainability, as applicable, such as energy fields. Note here that the impact of dependent variable in these articles usually are various aspects of sustainability, rather than issues centered on ICT. Journals that are deeply oriented on the sustainability issue as the main impact variable will generally have a wider set of reviewers that are able to deliver relevant reviews.
With this, I have described above a simple lock-in problem for journals and also conference communities, that is, that the transition to new topics and new research interests is a long process because of the competence inertia. Simply put, there is a tendency to keep on what is being done already because reviewer communities and research have made an investment in a certain profile, and there are increasing returns to continue with the competence and networks already there.
Moving forward, to change a discourse and research agenda within a community and conference organization, a concerted effort to promote new ideas, new initiatives, and new research is needed. And that is not so easy when such an organization has limited funds to promote new research directions, compared with the role of research agencies. That constraint being realized, I congratulate the TPRC community for broadening the research agenda and types of articles over the years! It is not only that the formal title of the conference has changed although the TPRC acronym has been stable, moving from Telecommunications Policy Research Conference to Research Conference on Communications, Information, and Internet Policy, as the formal name of the conference. The actual program of the conference has been broadened considerably, compared with my first visit at the TPRC in 1990.
These increasing returns may change if there is a kind of shock to the system, which suggests that the competence developed is irrelevant and not useful. And with the external forces providing an increasing complex set of issues in terms of climate change and geopolitical changes, shocks are expected. To throw out just one facet, the current bet by Russia to change the world order may have a supporting driver in climate change, as the Russian inland may become more habitable and suitable for agriculture over time compared with more southern places such as China and USA. It is sometimes said that countries in the more northern regions and countries such as Canada, Russia, and the Nordic countries would have comparative net gains due to climate change, compared with the increasing climate suffering of more southern regions. But no region will go without suffering and dramatic change, only that some regions will be comparatively better off in overall impacts, and the upper northern regions seem to have some benefits.
This brings me to final consideration of development of long-term research agendas, and that is innovation. Innovation has not typically been part of the traditional telecommunications policy discourse, as the fundamental models guiding various aspects of policy advice has been based on traditional or main-stream economics. As is well known, this kind of economics is not primarily interested in innovation but rather the allocation of limited resources in some static or stable context. Infusing innovation in that context will impart unclear conditions and constraints and will contribute toward unstable or nonexisting equilibriums. Of course, there are a lot of articles on various aspects that cover economics of innovation in its own field, but this discourse has not altered the telecommunications policy discourse much. There are few active authors in the current regular TPRC community that consistently tries to bridge innovation economics with various telecommunications policy concerns, but they are a relatively small minority.
It has sometimes been said that the first US dollar trillionaire will come from someone who can innovate and provide some workable solutions to the climate change challenge. There will be a considerable willingness to pay for innovation that in some way on a massive scale can deal with climate change, and such innovations promise as well to have geopolitical consequences. If the United States would become a leader to combat sustainability challenges and, in particular, climate change based on innovations in technologies and services, this will serve to provide additional geopolitical strength. The relationship is not simple though. Major innovations on for instance efficient carbon storage have an interesting free-ride problem as well, between those who deploy and harvest the innovation and those regions that get benefit from the innovation because of spillover effects. Regardless of complications, it seems safe to bet that ICT in its broad terms would be involved as well for such climate change combating innovations. But time is desperately short to overcome the climate change challenge, and solutions are few in coming.
The TPRC community could perhaps become an additional vehicle where the earlier tripartite problem complex is discussed together with the innovation dimension. Perhaps, this is a wishful thinking, but it seems that new and relevant policy discourses can be formulated that bridge not only the three earlier dimensions but that innovation theories and innovation studies can further support and define a promising research agenda. TPRC could contribute to an important policy discourse for this interaction, supported by research. This would be my wish for TPRC over the next 50 years!
Resisting and Influencing the Policy Environment and Responding to Technological Change: The Role of TPRC for the Next 50 Years
This invitation to consider the role of TPRC for the next 50 years inevitably prompted reflection on my experiences as an attendee and participant in the conference over the past 20 or so years. I think it’s important to emphasize that my attendance and participation has been somewhat sporadic during this time, so my perspective is not one of a true TPRC insider (though I did spend a few years on the program committee way back when). My resulting lack of institutional knowledge may mean that the perspective I bring to this topic is a bit more superficial, a bit more out-sider-looking-in, than is likely to be the case for many of the other contributions to this special issue. With that disclaimer out of the way, one thing I can say with certainty is that when I look back at my experiences at TPRC, I realize that some of these experiences are difficult, if not impossible, to replicate at any of the other conferences that I attend regularly as a communications policy scholar. So, I’ll begin with some personal reflections.
I recall completing my article presentation one year, and being approached after the panel by a senior Federal Communications Commission (FCC) attorney. He told me that he had enjoyed the article (he had even read it in advance; who does that anymore?) and that he was hoping that we could talk about it in greater depth. We found ourselves in a quiet corner in the George Mason University Law School, and he pulled out a hard copy of my article on which he had written extensive notes in the margins on virtually every page. I had never received such thoughtful, thorough, and useful feedback on a conference article before (and never have since)—and all from the invaluable perspective of an FCC staffer with years of experience in the trenches of communications regulation and policy. And, hopefully, there was at least something within that article that proved useful to him in his own work.
Another year, I remember an article I presented prompting a respectful and incredibly thought-provoking post-panel argument between a senior FCC economist and the CEO of a public interest organization. I learned more listening in on that one argument than I typically do from the entirety of most other conferences that I attend.
Another time, I was presenting an article that revisited a fairly old and undeniably very obscure piece of failed congressional legislation, only to find that one of the then-congressional staffers who had helped draft the legislation 15 years earlier happened to be sitting in the audience. He shared with me personal recollections that greatly improved the article. He was clearly a bit bemused that someone had thought it worthwhile to take a deep dive into this obscure corner of communications policy history. I like to think that I managed to convince him that his work back then had plenty of contemporary relevance.
Reflecting on these valuable experiences from my somewhat sporadic attendance at TPRC over the past 20 years has helped to clarify my thinking a bit about the topic at hand—the role of TPRC over the next 50 years. As my recollections indicate, TPRC has distinguished itself as a rare venue in which academics and policy professionals come together, on equal footing, to think about the future of communications, information, and Internet policy. It is an environment in which there is a shared appreciation for research-driven approaches to tackling policy problems; and where academic researchers can find themselves in conversation with those who directly make policy change happen. In the course that I teach in Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy on Political Analysis of Public Policymaking, we spend a fair bit of time talking about knowledge brokers (individuals/organizations who connect producers and users of knowledge/research)2; and I always hold up the organizers of TPRC as a prime example of effective and impactful knowledge brokers. These kinds of opportunities remain a rarity for scholars. We have an entire program at my school called the Policy Bridge that is designed to address this problem.
How can this knowledge brokerage be best leveraged going forward over the next 50 years? Answering this question requires taking a hard look not only at the state of communications, information, and Internet policy, but also at the broader political and cultural contexts in which these policies are deliberated, made, and evaluated (yes, I clearly can’t help approaching this subject like it’s a topic for my Political Analysis of Public Policymaking course).
Obviously, we enter the next 50 years of communications, information, and Internet policymaking in a very different place politically than we have witnessed at any time during the previous 50 years.3 As I write this (June, 2022), I am taking frequent breaks to watch congressional testimony detailing efforts by an outgoing president to overthrow the government. And miraculously, this same outgoing president remains, at this point, a front-runner for the next presidential election.
The times have certainly changed. Evidence, facts, research, and data all seem to matter a fair bit less to certain segments of the population (and policymakers) than they have in any time in recent history. Consequently, we obviously need to be realistic (probably even pessimistic) about the role that a conference like TPRC can play, and the impact that it can have, in such an environment. Indeed, we may need to be more modest in our ambitions and simply ask if/how TPRC can maintain what it has been over the past 50 years, rather than expect it to be able to do anything more. I recognize that I’m asking more questions than I’m answering. I’m unfortunately going to continue to do this.
It’s impossible to consider the policy environment in which TPRC operates without considering the pronounced polarization and increased political extremism that has come to characterize the US politics and policymaking.4 This is a topic that has been chronicled and analyzed ad infinitum and so does not require further elaboration here.5 In considering the next 50 years of TPRC, the obvious question is: Can the conference stand above this political polarization and instead help nudge the pendulum in the other direction, and be a force for the depolarization—and depoliticization—of communications, information, and Internet policymaking? This may be too much to ask of a research conference, even one that has effectively served as many diverse constituencies (along ideological, disciplinary, and professional/occupational lines) as TPRC.
But at the very least it would seem essential that TPRC be able to resist becoming a venue for perpetuating this problem (itself no easy task, as knowledge broker forums become contested territory).6 Here, the conference’s gatekeeping function becomes particularly important. We may need to ask of the conference organizers something similar to what we’re asking of journalists today—to resist traditional noncritical notions of “balance”; to avoid falling into “both side-ism”; and, most important, to be comfortable relying on one’s own independent expertise, analysis, and ethical compass to make determinations about whose work and whose viewpoints do/do not merit inclusion.
An obvious by-product of this polarization and politicization is the continuing ossification of US communications, information, and Internet policymaking. Compared to so many other countries, very little has been accomplished in recent years on the policy front, even as the range of problems that would seem to merit some form of policy intervention (privacy, disinformation, information inequalities, news deserts, platform dominance, etc.) has increased.7 This stagnation of US communications, information, and Internet policymaking is particularly problematic given the extent to which many US media/telecom/tech sector companies/platforms are, to some degree, foundational to the global communications and information ecosystem. We’re essentially exporting our policy inaction to other countries for them to deal with. Even FCC commissioner positions sit vacant for stretches of time that are simply unconscionable—a further indication of how paralyzed the process has become.8
Is there anything that rigorous policy research of the type showcased at TPRC can do to help jumpstart the process? Probably not, unfortunately. But policy change tends to be slow and incremental. Many of us who do policy research have, at some point over the past few years, probably had that stare-in-the-mirror moment when we’ve asked ourselves whether the kind of work that we do really matters anymore. Most of us, fortunately, have concluded that the answer is yes, if for no other reason than that the proliferation of knowledge vacuums could very well make things worse.9
We’ve talked so far about how the political environment has changed in the 50 years since TPRC’s creation. Probably even more significant has been the degree of technological change. In his 1997 reflection on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of TPRC, Bruce Owen noted that continued interest in the conference was most likely a function of the “cataclysmic events that have shaken the communications industries since the 1970s.”10 It is safe to say that the events from the 1970s through the mid-1990s (when Owen was writing) have taken the notion of cataclysmic a whole different level. In 1997, we had yet to experience anything close to the full extent of the destabilizing, evolutionary, and (in some contexts) revolutionary effects of the diffusion of the Internet. The subsequent overlaying of social media platforms on top of the Internet was still roughly a decade from ramping up. Dial-up Internet access for exceeded broadband. Literally, thousands more newspapers existed than exist now. And, of course, mobile devices could do little more beyond traditional telephones in 1997 than offer a variety of ring tones.
These technological changes have undermined traditional business models, facilitated new ones, created massive new repositories of data (sometimes accessible for research purposes, sometimes not; and sometimes used for far more troubling objectives), and, many would argue, have helped give rise to some of the political problems described earlier.11 This political environment in turn makes policy responses to these technological changes unlikely.12 So, essentially, we have a mutually reinforcing set of conditions.
From a research standpoint, the end result of these technological changes is that the kinds of questions being asked at TPRC have changed (or at least expanded) dramatically. The kinds of data and methodological approaches that are being brought to bear have expanded as well. These changes have required an inclusiveness that has, fortunately, been a hallmark of the organizers of TPRC.
On this front, TPRC must continue (perhaps even strengthen) its tradition of hospitability to a diversity of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.13 When we look at the history of communications, information, and Internet policy research, we can identify waves of disciplinary influx. So, for instance, a field dominated primarily by lawyers received an influx of economists beginning in the mid-1970s.14 Bruce Owen chronicles this process in his reflection on the origins of TPRC.15 As Owen recollects, the first TPRC featured presentations by 13 economists and two lawyers. Media and communications scholars become increasingly engaged with policy issues around the early 1990s and so found their way into the TPRC agenda as well.16 And then, most recently, we see the influx of computer and data scientists, reflecting the increasing intersection of the media, communications, and technology sectors as well as the increasing availability of troves of data that are inherent in the operation of contemporary digital media platforms.17 The “invisible college” that economist Stanley Besen attributed TPRC with creating has become increasingly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary.18 Given the scope, complexity, and impact of contemporary communications, information, and Internet policy, this multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are essential.
Conclusion
Many of the researchers in the fields/disciplines represented at TPRC were likely told at some point in their education or their research career that their decision to focus their attention on communications/media/telecom policy was, to some degree, a decision to self-marginalize, to place oneself at the periphery of one’s home field or discipline. It was something I was told on a few occasions; and I know of political scientists, economists, and lawyers who were all, at some point told something similar. The past two decades have made clear how misguided this perspective has been; though the validation/vindication that has come with the increasing centrality of our digital communications ecosystem to all aspects of commerce, politics, and culture has been accompanied by the stakes associated with communications, information, and Internet policy becoming higher than those of us working in the field likely ever anticipated. It may not be hyperbole to state that the work being done by this invisible college is more important now than it has ever been. The growing challenge that TPRC faces is helping the work of this invisible college to have an impact.
“Looking Back, Looking Forward: Two Persistent Public Policy Issues and How TPRC Might Help to Address Them”
Introduction
At TPRC25, one of the authors noted that Universal Access to Basic Services at Affordable Cost was an important policy issue during the 1st TPRC in 1972; it and the Digital Divide continued to be an important issue in 1997. He predicted that this broad policy issue would persist and be discussed at TPRC50. Today, the author thinks that this issue will persist, due to changes in technology and societal expectations, and predicts that it will still be discussed at TPRC75, if not even longer.
The other broad, persistent policy issue relates to Governance Structures for the global Internet. Discussion of this issue was in its infancy at the time of TPRC25. Today it looms large on the agenda of TPRC50. It looks certain to persist until TPRC75 and beyond.
In this article we look at why these public policy issues are persistent and explore ways in which the TPRC community might help to address them.
Background
The Internet was commercialized in 1994, shortly before TPRC25. At that time there were some 70 million users, mostly in developed countries, and the desktop personal computer was the main device for accessing the Internet. As of 2021, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)19 some 95% of the world’s population is covered by a communications network; the mobile phone, with over 8.6 billion global subscriptions, of which some 6.5 billion are active broadband subscriptions, is the world’s most widely used communications device; and there are some 4.9 billion Internet users located in 200 jurisdictions. In both developed and developing countries, the ubiquitous smartphone has become the communications device of choice, the most common means of accessing the Internet and using its applications and services, including social media platforms.
The growth of social media over the last 20 years has paralleled that of the Internet as a whole. Today, there are an estimated 4.6 billion social media users worldwide, constituting almost 95% of total Internet users. The most popular platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter, count their regular users in the billions, or at least hundreds of millions. On average, these users spend 2.5 hours on social media each day.20
However, the ITU statistics also indicate that the ability to connect to the Internet remains profoundly unequal across the world. Of the estimated 4.9 billion global Internet users in 2021, some 1.16 billion (23.6%) were in developed countries and 3.74 billion (76.4%) in developing countries. Of the 2.9 billion people in the world who are still offline, some 96% live in developing countries. These statistics underpin the profound Digital Divide that exists between the Internet “Haves” and “Have-nots.”21
Universal Access and the Persistent Digital Divides
Universal Access means access at affordable cost, primarily by individuals and households, to communications networks and defined basic services; the term “Universal Service” is often used interchangeably. The issue persists over time because the goalposts shift; the definition of Universal Access is broadened due to technological progress and changing societal needs and expectations. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tele-education, tele-medicine, e-commerce, and online payment systems are now widely perceived as essential social and economic services. Broadband Internet is becoming the “new electricity” of the 21st century; access to broadband Internet is being seen as essential, in the same category as access to electricity and clean drinking water.
In 1972, the norm for Universal Access to telecommunications services was a household with a telephone connected via a wireline local loop to the Telecommunications Carrier’s analogue, narrow-band, public switched telephone network (PSTN), which provided dial-up access to local calling service and long-distance services. In 2022, Universal Access is being defined as broadband access to the Internet, using a smartphone, tablet, or personal computer, connecting via a digital, packet-switched, wireless mobile communications network or high bandwidth wireline network (PSDN).
Important Digital Divides persist for broadband Internet, both geographical and in its adoption and use. Geographical urban/rural divides exist because of limitations of the rural network infrastructure and the higher cost of serving thinly populated and remote areas. Many countries have some kind of a Universal Service Fund (USF),22 based on contributions from Telcos, which is used to subsidize service provision in high-cost serving areas. Such USFs can also be used to subsidize services to rural schools and healthcare facilities. In India, the USF has been used as the primary funding vehicle for BharatNet,23 a national, high bandwidth network that extends broadband connectivity to the gram panchayat level (some 250,000 village administrative units).
Over the last 20 years, some countries have put in place a separately funded National Broadband Plan, to provide universal broadband access and narrow the Digital Divide. South Korea and Australia24 are important examples. We shall look further at the US case.
Some 30 million Americans still live in areas lacking a network infrastructure that provides minimal acceptable broadband speeds, as currently defined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). A considerable number do not use broadband Internet because it costs them too much.
With the Rural Electrification Act of 193625 as a precedent, the Infrastructure Act of 2021,26 signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021, will narrow the Digital Divide through an investment of some $45 billion in broadband infrastructure deployment and help ensure that every American has access to reliable, high-speed Internet. Eligible funding recipients include telcos, technology companies, electric utilities, and utility cooperatives, they are obliged to offer a low-cost service plan as a funding condition. The legislation will help to lower prices for Internet service, allowing more Americans to make full use of Internet access. Several major US Internet service providers have agreed to offer basic broadband Internet access at a price of some $30/month.
Digital Divides in the adoption and use of broadband Internet by disadvantaged and marginalized groups (e.g., low-income groups, those lacking necessary digital skills) are more difficult to tackle, because they require demand side measures. Affordability issues have usually been addressed via the provision of targeted subsidies for Internet access and basic services. The FCC’s $14.2 billion Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP),27 funded through the Infrastructure Act, is a good example. The ACP, an FCC benefit program, helps ensure that households can afford the broadband they need for work, school, healthcare, and more. The benefit provides a discount of up to $30 per month toward Internet service for eligible households. Such households can also receive a one-time discount of up to $100 to purchase a laptop, desktop computer, or tablet from participating providers, if they contribute more than $10 and less than $50 toward the purchase price. As of May 16, 2022, there were over 11.8 million households enrolled in the ACP.
However, the lack of digital skills, which is often a result of deep-seated social inequalities, remains an important factor in limiting the ability of marginalized groups to use the Internet to their optimum benefit.
Initiatives to narrow these Digital Divides require stable and long-term funding at the national level, which can come from a variety of sources. One possibility would be to greatly increase the size and scope of an existing USF, so that it could be used for upgrading rural/remote network infrastructures, as well as providing targeted subsidies to address affordability issues. A portion of the revenues from future spectrum auctions could be flowed into an expanded USF.
A far more radical proposal would be to impose some kind of a “Digital Packet Tax”28 on Internet traffic and use the collected revenues to narrow the Digital Divides. The analogy here is the federal gasoline tax, used to provide a revenue stream for the US Highway Trust Fund, which in turn was used to fund the construction of the Interstate Highway System. The feasibility or even desirability of such a “Digital Packet Tax” would require much further discussion, before any policy steps could be explored and taken.
The Internet, Social Media, and Governance Issues
Since its commercialization, the Internet has transformed our economy and society. The enormous socioeconomic benefits derived from its use have largely been appropriated over the last 25 years, by individuals, institutions, companies, and governments. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, creating the most serious global health crisis in a century, it triggered major new uses that brought out the best of the Internet. The power and reach of social media platforms have also increased greatly, as has their ability to provide communications to disadvantaged groups.
However, the Internet was never designed for secure commercial and social use at a global scale. It developed outside the kinds of legal and regulatory frameworks that governed the growth of previous transportation and communication networks. A universal and global “network of networks” with intelligence at the edges, the Internet does not respect national jurisdictions. It lacks a robust self-governance structure, particularly at the applications and content layers, that can define and enforce accepted rules. Consequently, the Internet cannot police itself against abuse, and its negative impacts are steadily increasing in scale and scope.
The pandemic exacerbated some of the Internet’s worst aspects: an upsurge in hacking, identity theft, cybercrime, and so on. More serious is the social cost resulting from an erosion of trust and confidence in institutions and governments, caused by the unconstrained use of social media to express extreme views, harass political opponents, propagate “alternative facts,” and conspiracy theories. Many developed and developing countries are experiencing the enormous negative impacts of these developments on the political discourse that is the lifeblood of all societies.
As defined by the 2003–2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Internet governance is a complex area that includes governance of Internet technical standards and resources; issues related to Internet platforms, services, applications, and content; and issues related to the impact of the Internet on economic, social, political, cultural, and security structures at every level, from local to national and global.29
While there is a broad international consensus regarding the technical issues related to the operation of the Internet (e.g. TCP/IP, allocation of IP addresses, Domain Name System), the consensus begins to break down over issues like net neutrality and cybersecurity, which have significant technical dimensions, but which are ultimately policy issues. More difficult still are issues like intellectual property rights, privacy, data protection, and freedom of expression, which fundamentally are issues of economic and social policy.
When it comes to Internet governance issues relating to the content and applications layers of the Internet, there is no consensus and at least two very separate models. There is the “Western Model” of an open Internet, as outlined in the “Declaration for the Future of the Internet,”30 and a “Chinese Model,” where the national government exercises significant surveillance and control over the content and application layers. These different models could lead to a geographical fragmentation of the Internet into a number of regional jurisdictions, a development that would risk suboptimizing the potential role of the Internet in global development.
Conclusions
The author concludes that the issue of Universal Access and its associated Digital Divides will persist, due to changes in technology and societal expectations, as well as continuing social inequalities; he predicts that this issue will still be discussed at TPRC75, or even longer.
The solutions for narrowing the urban/rural Digital Divide are well understood, and can be implemented at the national level. However, upgrading the rural and remote network infrastructure will require sustained investments over long periods of time. Affordability issues can be addressed through targeted subsidies for low-income groups, but these need to be carefully designed and sustained over time through a long-term funding mechanism. Divides stemming from social inequalities, such as the lack of Digital Literacy among marginalized groups, are more difficult to address.
The author further concludes that issues related to Internet governance responsibilities, policies, and structures will not only persist, but are likely to become more prominent on public policy agendas, with little prospect for international agreement on these issues for the foreseeable future.
The Potential Role of the TPRC
TPRC promotes multidisciplinary thinking on current and emerging issues in communications and the Internet, by bringing together a diverse, international group of researchers and analysts from academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations, to challenge each other’s ideas and to interact with policy makers and members of the private sector.
Broadband deployment, adoption, and use have been a constant theme at many TPRCs. As such, TPRC provides an excellent forum for freely discussing proposals like using revenues from future spectrum auctions to replenish enlarged USFs; or the feasibility, pros, and cons of a novel idea such as a “Digital Packet Tax,” which would be used to provide a stable source of funding for initiatives to narrow the various Digital Divides.
TPRC also provides an excellent forum for freely discussing ideas and proposals that could help to establish a broader consensus regarding the numerous issues related to Internet governance, particularly of the applications and content layers of the Internet, including their impacts on the economy, society, politics, and government.
Although primarily based among scholars, policy researchers, and practitioners from the United States, Europe, and other countries that have subscribed to the “Declaration for the Future of the Internet,” the TPRC could also have a useful role to play at the global level, through peer-to-peer exchanges with policy researchers in countries that have different perspectives on the relationship between the development of the Internet and overall economic and social development. In this connection, a forthcoming series of events sponsored by the United Nations could provide an opportunity for dialogue and collaboration.
In 2020, United Nations Member States adopted a Declaration31 on the Commemoration of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the United Nations which contains this pledge:
“We will improve digital cooperation. Digital technologies have profoundly transformed society. They offer unprecedented opportunities and new challenges. We must ensure safe and affordable digital access for all. The United Nations can provide a platform for all stakeholders to participate in such deliberations.”
In response to the Declaration, Secretary-General Guterres’ report32, Our Common Agenda, proposed a “Summit of the Future” in 2023 to agree, among other things, on a Global Digital Compact33 that would “outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all.”
According to the SG’s report, the issues to be addressed by the Summit may include reaffirming the fundamental commitment to connecting the unconnected, avoiding fragmentation of the Internet, and promoting a trustworthy Internet by introducing accountability criteria for discrimination and misleading content.
In preparation for the Summit, the SG proposed that the United Nations, Governments, the private sector, and civil society could come together as a multi-stakeholder digital technology track. Given its resources and capabilities, the TPRC may wish to consider participating in this track with the aim of contributing to the development of a Global Digital Compact.
The Role of TPRC for the Next 50 Years
Fully 20 years ago, David Clark and coauthors wrote an essay contemplating the dilemmas facing the young and evolving Internet.34 They invoked the idea of tussles in this essay, a somewhat mild term to denote some of the contentious problems playing out in the Internet domain across different constituencies—users, designers, companies, policymakers, and others. They scrutinized three combative domains in particular—economics, trust, and openness—and exhorted technologists to design for flexibility and choice to sidestep or minimize tussles growing out of economic clashes, distrust among different parties, providers or goals, and efforts to control or commoditize all elements of the Internet, closing its many open qualities.
As a view of how policy operates and what it must confront, tussles was a supremely technocratic yet generative way of approaching the problems of communication systems. It seems emblematic of a tone that people at TPRC generally adopt or cultivate, one that integrates awareness of the technical side of communication technologies but also acutely engages with how structures, whether policy or regulatory or economic or social, can interact with and improve the system. Clark shared his ideas at TPRC on some occasions, and his emphasis on practical “solutions” remains refreshingly current and optimistic when thinking of many communication infrastructures. That said, looking forward with one foot in the past allows us to consider both how good the solutions have been, and how a vehicle such as TPRC and our engagements with each other in that forum, and perhaps with policy vehicles more broadly, might best grapple with where we are going. Reframing the consequentialist, problem-solving approach that characterized so many policy formulations, an approach generally focused on the short-term and reliant on the strong interests of affected industries in lieu of broader representation of social concerns, is in order. Communication and information industries evolve rapidly, and policy approaches that can adapt to the newest tier of problems may have to be differently conceived.
TPRC, now sporting the friendlier name The Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy, has functioned over the past 50 years as a lively forum. Its mode of convening has grown over the years as it embraced new forms of scholarship, cultivated graduate student interest and expertise through a doctoral consortium, signaled emerging topical issues with its panels, endeavored to reach the policymaking community, and became more internationally focused. It always has been unique in actively seeking to link contemporary scholarly research with people in policy positions and in industries who might actually use that research, improve it, or debate it. It has been a networking success and spawned partnerships of various kinds.
Nevertheless, at least three factors suggest a different trajectory for analyzing communications policy and policymaking and forging an agenda. The first highlights lessons learned from the last few years of COVID, which underscore the deep inequities in broadband connectivity on the one hand, and the false assumption of easy and widespread network access among many major institutions, particularly education. Second, more pressure points around the role of the State and regulation (doubly significant with the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding the EPA’s regulatory authority in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency) exist, especially in the face of scant controls on the technology companies producing troves of data about us and about our transactions in the world. Are contemporary policy instruments sufficient? Third, those same powerful companies developing systems profoundly enmeshed with our political, economic, and social lives, are financially dominant, global, and on a course to develop more autonomous, AI-driven systems whose long-term consequences are poorly tested. From recommendation systems to spreading disinformation to creating online forums adept at fomenting hate, to Internet of Things home-based devices, AI routines embedded in the most innocuous human and social activities produce data that quietly reshape institutions and practices, and they evolve quickly.
Recognizing the significance of these three developments should challenge many ideas about how the professional community convened by TPRC establishes its agenda, as well as how we educate and share ideas. As of 2022, rethinking what our conferences do for us and for the broader field, as well as how scholars communicate and think about change—the “how” of a conference as well as the “what” of a conference—may be in order. What is most important to air and accomplish? What sorts of debates deserve attention? How can researchers effectively bring their findings to policymakers? More importantly, what values should policy research foreground at this juncture?
First, if the past 50 years offer a model, then the next 50 years certainly will usher in huge technological changes. One can easily generate a laundry list of significant innovations in a half century retrospective, led by the transformation from analog to digital systems. A short list from the US experience would acknowledge how NASA’s experimental communication satellites (the ATS series and CTS, both international partnerships) probed the performance capabilities of space-based links, setting the stage for commercializing this NASA-developed technology and creating direct broadcast services and other transmission links. Within the United States, then-nascent cable television systems filled the gaps in conventional broadcast reception as well as offered new programming, eventually using communication satellite capabilities to create entirely new services scaled for widespread distribution. Few anticipated the cable industry’s later role as an Internet service provider or its impact on commercial broadcasting.
The other major form of communications, the mundane telephone, under AT&T’s monopoly control for most of the century with 90% of the telephone access lines in the 1970s, was about to test its restraints: a 1956 Consent Decree prohibited AT&T from providing “information services” and from manufacturing equipment for all but the regulated services. Along came MCI and a raft of antitrust suits that culminated in the dismantling of the Bell system by 1984, followed by a rapid reconsolidation of telephone service mostly into the hands of a few large companies. Those information services, so ill-defined in the Computer Inquiries conducted by the FCC in the 60s, 70s, and 80s as it sought to grapple with computers’ roles with communication industries, exploded later and created entirely new systems, uses, and businesses as their computer-based flexibility and power converged with telecommunications. Mobile services have entirely eclipsed landline telephony, adding new dimensions to what a phone might be and how it might support new forms of communication services, all along producing a trail of data that is itself an important commodity for companies. A host of other technologies, too numerous to mention here, augmented the communication landscape.
Then, there was the Internet. Like communication satellites, that network also took shape within an experimental environment supported by federal scientific and defense investments and various universities in the final decades of the 20th century. Although the Internet’s history includes elements of decentralization, in part because it is composed of many separate networks with multiple points of control, its commercialization in the early 1990s and intersection with other innovations and systems prompted yet another large-scale shift of communication practices and industries. Overall, these developments moved communication industries structurally from historically separable domains of print, broadcasting, and telephony toward services supported by various infrastructure systems (landlines, spectrum, networks, etc.) that incorporate software-driven applications. In the current decade, companies such as Microsoft and Amazon continue to reshape this configuration as they operate the network structure that undergirds many companies’ services and products. They operate not only to develop the private sector; those same structures also support public services as ordinary as traffic cameras and municipal open data portals.
TPRC has been a forum providing important information and ideas about these technological innovations, the “shiny things,” and their economic impacts through their evolution. However, the technology systems themselves were molded by major businesses and by a political climate that embraced a neoliberal ethos of marketplace regulation. The latter is certainly a hallmark of that late 20th-century era, and its dominance now is barely acknowledged since it is woven into the fabric of so many assumptions. Indeed, it has acquired a moral tone. The hands-off approach to regulation thoroughly institutionalized through the Telecommunications Act of 1996 sought to allow innovative technologies to develop unfettered by regulations or policies but was tone-deaf to their social and political potential. By 2022, however, amid all the upsides to that approach, we now also appreciate the many negatives.
The next 50 years should reenvision how policy might operate and how to reinscribe values beyond economic optimization into the creation and operations of communication companies. It is opportune for TPRC to initiate the types of conversations, for example, that accompanied the creation of the US Public Broadcasting Service, which launched in 1970 on the heels of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, initiated in 1967. The big issues and the notion of the social goals and values of equity and fairness that could drive technological functions are difficult to imagine in the contemporary era. When technological systems such as broadcasting were younger and perhaps more malleable, lively debates were afoot about what broadcasting should look like, and how it should serve the public. Former FCC Chair Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech of 1961 still resonated; the idea of public service and the obligations of large communications entities catalyzed legions of TV critics and would-be reform efforts from the 60s to the 90s. Novel ideas about television and our quality of life, our children and education as well as television “effects” circulated. Similarly, before its commercialization, the early Internet attracted advocates who promulgated network visions embracing communitarian values and open, shared resources amid end-to-end principles; some celebrated the elements of localism and community engagement in its use.35 The communitarian but also libertarian vision for the Internet animated discussions about new ways to unite people and to create peer endeavors of all sorts.36 Once the network was privatized, most of these ideas were relegated to the dustbins of “romantic” notions, particularly in the United States.37 The growing drumbeat to allow the marketplace to “decide” which services and configurations should be offered or maintained drowned out alternative conceptualizations even as the companies developing infrastructures and services assumed new shapes and powers through mergers and acquisitions. While many communication and information companies became prosperous, whether the nation also progressed in terms of social goals, including how children engage in technologies, how equity and fairness grew, how educational goals were achieved, and how local communities were strengthened, can be questioned.
Compounding the neoliberal emphasis on profitability and faith in markets, the evolving surveillance capitalism model for technology companies such as Google and Apple exploded in the past 10 years against a policy backdrop struggling to keep up with new capabilities much less figure out how and where to intervene and with what goals. Simultaneously, public surveillance routines are swathed in techno-optimistic language around “smart cities” or security, often masking the questions these companies and services raise about privacy and fairness. Matters of equity are breaking through as more instances of egregious behavior or outcomes become public. Whether one considers Edward Snowden’s revelations about extensive public surveillance of citizens or the use of problematic facial recognition by police or ceding human judgment to AI-driven assessments in areas such as hiring or social services, it seems apparent that technological capability now escapes legislative or regulatory scrutiny.38
Returning to tussles, the steady “propertization” of public goods qualities embedded in the design and regulation of multiple communication infrastructures helped to erase awareness of the broader possible contributions of these systems to national identity, human flourishing, democratic functioning, and social goals such as fairness and equality. Whether one examines changes in copyright law or platform content moderation policies, for example, maintaining policy or legal systems that conspicuously and consciously seek to enhance the quality of life present a conflicted record. TPRC showcases research that examines how technological innovation and change actively meet the constraints and goals of a policymaking system that is part judicial, part legislative, part political, against the gradient of a large and powerful set of industries. The gathering of technologists with economists, lawyers, social scientists, computer scientists, public interest advocates, industry representatives, and people from communications-related agencies including the FCC and NTIA from the United States, international agencies such as the World Bank or AID, and other countries’ regulatory entities, among others, sometimes illustrate the clash or intersection of different disciplinary languages. This is an asset, but predictably, the language of economics has been dominant in the recent past. Researchers have probably focused too often on the latest, shiny technologies at the expense of a bigger picture and without sufficient reference to alternative value systems that might recast policy options. I suggest some other discourses and themes may be important for the future.
With notions of democracy and social responsibility especially fraught right now, it seems incumbent on TPRC to reintroduce and revitalize these concepts with respect to communication industries. Reemphasizing a moral compass and ideas about social responsibility are doubly important even as the perils of corporate size and power have gained recognition. TPRC could adopt a role that actively weds public accountability to normative goals of equity, allowing it to productively drive practical policies regarding such matters as broadband deployment and technological literacy programs. Even as a raft of new legislation is being introduced in 2022 to protect privacy, curtail corporate power, and even adjudicate how companies treat content, new apparatuses to the policy repertoire appear necessary because technological circumstances will change. Using ethical principles to guide the shape of technology-based services may offer an alternative and more adaptation-friendly approach.
Sen’s capabilities approach, or an ethics-of-care value system, offers useful contrasts to the solutionist policy approaches that have dominated many countries.39 Human rights language and principles may offer normative guideposts that might inform communication policies in new ways. Alongside the goal of social responsibility, our scholarly agendas must more vigorously explore models from around the world.
Communications industries are global, and many nations’ policies offer alternative framings and experiences that may decenter the market approach. The communication and information industries operate worldwide, yet policymakers seem slow to learn from the successes and failures of other countries. To that end, TPRC might devote its discussions to how ethical principles could be wedded to policy and regulation in new ways and with new benchmarks, and more actively seek to share international models. Examining systems of adaptive regulation, an approach now considered in a range of fields including health, transportation, and fintech that are characterized by evolving technologies, might be especially useful in the rapidly changing environments of technology.
Finally, cultivating additional technological expertise for people serving in policy arenas also would be helpful. TPRC should be a catalyst in invigorating such preparation. It seems clear we need much better understanding of technology among policymakers, perhaps even a renewal of an Office of Technology Assessment—whose staff at one time participated in the conferences.
Thrilling Adventures in Consumer Research
Calling grandma when I was a child was a major family event. My mother or father, holding the handset of the rotary phone in one hand and a watch in the other, would keep an eye on the time. Calls to Taiwan were several dollars a minute, every second counted. When I joined the Federal Communications Commission one of the first issues I worked on involved persuading other countries to end their monopolies on international phone service. The monopolies kept rates high. Monopolies in domestic phone markets were ending, investment in the submarine cables that carried international phone calls was booming, and voice over Internet Protocol and other business arrangements enabled more enterprising customers a way to run around the old system. Fairly quickly, rates fell.40 Seeing something I worked on actually help people I knew was hugely satisfying.
Congratulations to TPRC, the Policy Research Conference on Communications, Information, and the Internet, on its 50th anniversary. That is a long time for a conference to continue and it reflects success in creating a community of scholars and policymakers that want and need to work together. For many years, I have participated regularly and it is an important arena that establishes what should be our priorities, what are the best tools and data for the problems at hand, and who next might have the best ideas. Therefore, of course, I was delighted at the invitation to contribute to this special issue, because there is a perspective that could use more of our attention—the consumer’s point of view.
Producers create a service or good, and consumers use it up. Producers are the supply curve and consumers are the demand curve. Businesses have customers, another way to think of consumers. Consumer groups also are distinct from business groups and labor unions. On the whole, there are a lot more incentives for studying things from the business point of view. There is more funding. It is easier to get data. Defining markets appears easier. Taking the consumer point of view makes problems more complicated. But, isn’t that more interesting?
The first reason to take a consumer perspective is that it feels good. You can actually connect your work, often highly specialized and difficult to explain to friends outside your TPRC circle, to the larger questions that improve the lives of your fellow human beings.
For example, what marks the end of monopoly and the beginning of competition a national telecommunications market? Usually, the main event is the entry of a second company, the first competitor to the now former monopoly. However, from the consumer’s perspective, the main event might be instead number portability—the right to take your phone number with you if you switch from one phone company to another.41 After all, if all your friends, family, and business colleagues know to reach you at one number, how are you going to let all of them that you have switched to a new number? Every time you switched, you would lose something.
That makes it hard to switch. Note that with number portability there is another subtle shift, the number goes with the consumer, not with the company. That shift has unlocked a whole world of alternative uses for the phone number—such as using for two-factor authentication, a function unforeseen when number portability was first implemented.
Another example goes further back in history. Before the breakup of AT&T, people had to lease their phones from the phone company. As Robert M. L. Johnson, City Manager of Marion, Iowa, 1972, said, “Leasing any item is a perpetual and extremely expensive proposition . . . A ‘hold’ button in the Northwestern Bell system costs $1.20 a month forever. A combined line and busy lamps cost $4.50 a month forever.” Once FCC rule changes allowed them, the city of Marion purchased an ITT communications system that was cheaper and had more features than the Bell system.42 Both the number portability and the equipment decision shifted the boundary between the producer’s sphere and consumer’s sphere, giving greater agency to the consumer and spurring innovation in the process. People you know, benefited.
The second reason is that this arena is filled with wrongs that need righting (and writing). Many of you may have had troubling complaints against one or more communications service provider. For months I had trouble completing my phone calls to my family in Tennessee; major phone company A blamed major phone company B and it took four months to fix. Major phone company C once told me that when I moved apartments from one side of a street to another that they could not port my phone number, so I had it ported to another company’s voice-over-IP. Phone company C failed to port correctly and for a few days, my phone number was lost somewhere in the system. Don’t get me started on cable companies and Internet service providers.
The heartening news is that with the digitalization there is a lot more data available to find out what is happening, or failing to happen. At the Federal Communications Commission, complaints data that used to be reported rarely and only in vague categories is now available by API.43
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) run largely annual surveys asking people about specific companies, with results published by industry sector and individual company. In contrast with gross domestic product, which measures the volume of a nation’s output, the ACSI measures the quality of the output.44 The most recent data include four sectors in the communications services area. The following graph shows how they rank compared to other sectors.
Source: American Customer Satisfaction Index https://www.theacsi.org/our-industries/.
Source: American Customer Satisfaction Index https://www.theacsi.org/our-industries/.
The best of the four communications sectors is wireless telecom service at 73; landline telecom follows at 71; and at the bottom are subscription television and Internet service providers. For 2021, the only other surveyed sector that is worse is government, another story that can also use investigation. From a historical perspective, wireless telecom services does best of the communications four. In 2007, it ranked 41st of 44 surveyed sectors, in 2017 it rose to 37th. Landline telecom fell from 33rd to 42nd; ISP’s fell from 42nd to 43rd; and subscription TV remained steady at 43rd.45
The research in this area suggests that at the microeconomic level, companies with higher customer satisfaction improve their financial performance and increase their stock prices.46 At the macroeconomic level, higher customer satisfaction increases customer spending, which in turn supports economic growth.47 Given that the four communications sectors appear to be at the bottom quartile of all sectors surveyed suggests there is room for improvement. Some researchers make the empirical observation that the larger a company’s market share, the lower its customer satisfaction, likely due to a more heterogenous group of customers with a wider variety of demands.48
The third reason is there is a real opportunity for cool innovative solutions. For example, Ginger Jin and her colleagues found that requiring restaurants in Los Angeles to post prominently the hygiene grade they received from health inspectors resulted in fewer food poisoning patients in local hospitals.49 Americans used to buy cars primarily on their looks and powerful engines, but greater awareness and information about safety, fuel efficiency, and environmental impact, now feed into consumer decisions. The same is true for a range of household appliances. Across the government and society, more data are available, some of it can be marshaled to help consumers.50
Finally, think about how consumers describe their experience using different categories than companies do. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration conducts a regular survey on how Americans use technology.51 For consumers, time is an important category—how much time are we on our computers, or how many times did we use that on-demand service? The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes data on how Americans use their time.52 In policy and regulation, we have gradually moved away from defining our studies by the technology or companies involved, to focus instead on function and use. Is there room for an even more radical rethinking, and what would the implications be?
This journal is a welcome home to many studies that take the consumer perspective. Cramer examines the evidence that the fracking industry locations in north central Pennsylvania have better cellular coverage than communities. Bisogni collects data privacy breach notifications sent to consumers and assesses their content and timeliness. Dahiya, Rokanas, Singh, Yang, and Peha, use Internet performance data and FCC complaint information to demonstrate consumer frustration with Internet access during the COVID pandemic, despite provider claims that service is just fine. At a conceptual level, Montgomery, Chester, and Kopp draw out potential concerns associated with health wearable devices that collect sensitive personal information for commercial purposes. Napoli challenges researchers to go beyond the easily available data to examine diversity in media from the perspective of choices consumers actually make, versus what is in principle available to them.53 It would be great to see more research that puts the actual consumer experience at the center of inquiry.
My discussion so far keeps to those things that have actually happened and not speculated on current or future events. However, the challenge that the consumer perspective presents is evergreen and can be applied to newer technologies. There is a boundary between consumer and producer spheres and that boundary can be shifted. There are many injustices, we should apply all our skills and knowledge to righting them. With a different perspective and a growing avalanche of data available to us, there are many opportunities for innovative inquiries and solutions. In the end, nothing beats doing work that has a real possibility of helping other people.
Again, it is been an honor to share some views on some challenges TPRC can tackle in the future. I look forward to seeing you there soon.
FOOTNOTES
Phipps and Morton, 255–65.
Napoli and Dwyer, 583–601.
Napoli and Dwyer, “U.S. media policy.”
Klein; Packer.
Craft and Hawlett, 491–503.
Napoli, 215–30.; Wheeler.
Lima.
Proctor and Schiebinger.
Owen.
Anderson and Rainie.
Napoli, “The symbolic uses.”
I recognize that not all scholars have necessarily found TPRC to be as hospitable as I have. I speak only based on personal experience as an attendee, presenter, and participant for a few years on the Program Committee; and in this regard am open to the argument that TPRC needs to be more hospitable to a diversity of disciplinary and methodological perspectives than it has been up to this point.
Corn-Revere and Carveth, 49–68.
Owen, “A novel conference.”
Ibid.; Napoli and Friedland, 41–65.
Napoli and Caplan.
Owen, “A novel conference.”
ITU-D ICT Statistics.
Datareportal.
United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
Universal Service Fund (USF).
BharatNet.
Australian National Broadband Network (NBN).
Rural Electrification Act.
“Building Back Better.”
Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Cordell.
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
European Commission. “Declaration for the Future of the Internet.”
United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
United Nations.
United Nations.
Clark et al.
Streeter.; Turner.; Rheingold.
Benkler.
Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
Virginia Eubanks.
Sen; Gilligan and Richards.
Stanley.
Wu.
U.S. Senate.
U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
Fornell, Morgeson, Hult, and VanAmburg.
Ibid., Table 5.1
Gupta and Zeithaml; Bradlow.
Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult.
Rego, Morgan, and Fornell.
Jin and Leslie.
White House.
National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Bisogni.