Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age.

• Author: Wallman, Kathleen
• Position: Book Review

Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age, Jonathan E. Nuechterlein & Philip J. Weiser, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2005, 670 pages.

Most practitioners of communications law are familiar with the necessity of teaching themselves enough economics, engineering, and politics to practice competently and comfortably in an area that is inherently interdisciplinary. Likewise, many professors who teach telecommunications from a variety of disciplinary perspectives are familiar with the frustration of locating a text that competently introduces students to this interdisciplinary subject matter.

Even more difficult is finding a reasonably contemporary text that covers the territory. Gerald Brock's Telecommunications Policy for the Information Age: From Monopoly to Competition (1) is an excellent and admirably succinct review of the law and economics of telecommunications policy from the assembly of the network up through the mid-nineties, but it stops there. Other works review the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ("Telecommunications Act") and the early stages of its implementation. But up until now, no work has attempted a medium range retrospective that links the pre-1996 story of communications policy with the short but sinuous history after 1996.

Accessibility of the text is another issue. While textbooks like Telecommunications Law and Policy (2) and Federal Telecommunications Law (3) are good tools for law students and LLM candidates, there is no contemporary work that opens the door on the interdisciplinary study of communications policy for students in the social sciences without training in the law.

There is also the challenge of historical continuity. So much of communications policy rests upon the decisions and compromises of the past. Without a firm grounding in what has gone before, it is impossible to participate critically in contemporary policymaking.

For example, a brief tour of the various Computer Inquiries is essential to understanding the contemporaneous distinction between information services and telecommunications services.

Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age (4) admirably answers these challenges with a work that introduces telecommunications policy to beginners and edifies experienced practitioners on gaps in history and knowledge. The scope of the book is ambitious, covering not only common carrier law and policy, but video media as well. This scope is...