News
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New Course by Bill Drake! The Changing Global Communications Order: Governing Electronic Networks
23rd August 10
The Division on Media Change & Innovation is excited to offer this new and cutting edge course in the Autumn term. Since the 1850s, governments, business, and civil society have established "rules of the game" governing international communication markets and cross-border information flows. Collectively, these frameworks define the global communications order. In recent years that order has been transformed by privatization, liberalization, and the Internet. This course will survey the evolution, political-economic power dynamics, and social impact of the global governance arrangements for telecommunications regulation, technical standardization, radio frequency spectrum, satellites, trade in goods and communication services, electronic commerce, intellectual property, mass media, Internet content, Internet domain names and numbers, cybercrime and security, privacy protection, and development, as well as the broader debates in the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society and Internet Governance Forum.
The course will be taught by Dr. William Drake, who is a Senior Associate of the Centre for International Governance at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a co-editor of the MIT Press book series, The Information Revolution and Global Politics. Drake is a leading international scholar of global communications policy, and has a diverse background. He has taught at Georgetown University and the University of California, San Diego in the USA; was a Senior Associate and Director of the Project on the Information Revolution and World Politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an influential foreign policy think tank in Washington DC; and has served as the elected president of a global civil liberties organization, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Drake is heavily involved as a public interest activist in a number of key global governance processes examined inthis course, such as the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and the UN’s Internet Governance Forum. As such, in this course he will be presenting an “insider’s perspective” on the current geopolitics of governance, particularly with respect to the Internet. He has also been involved in a number of related global networks and initiatives, such as the Global Internet Governance Academic Network and the International Summer Schools on Internet Governance. You can read more about him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/williamjdrake and watch his brief remarks at the UN’s 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm el Sheikh http://tinyurl.com/Drake-IGF09.
This course will be held biweekly on Mondays from 2 to 6pm. Course dates are:- September 20
- October 4
- October 18
- November 1
- November 15
- November 29
- December 13
Course language is English.
More
- Vorlesungsverzeichnis
- Bill Drake on LinkedIn
- Bill Drake’s Remarks at the UN’s 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm el Sheikh
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Further findings from the assessment of the Swiss public-service broadcaster’s (SRG) Internet offer have been published in the International Telecommunications Policy Review and in Medialex. Find more information in the publications section:
- Latzer, Michael / Braendle, Andreas / Just, Natascha / Saurwein, Florian (2010): Public-Service Broadcasting Online: Assessing Compliance with Regulatory Requirements. In: International Telecommunications Policy Review, 17(2), 1-25 [more]
- Latzer, Michael / Braendle, Andreas / Just, Natascha / Saurwein, Florian (2010): SRG Online Beobachtung: Konzessionskonformität von Webseiten und elektronischen Verbindungen. In: medialex, 15(2), 77-83 [more]
Further findings from the assessment of the Swiss public-service broadcaster’s (SRG) Internet offer have been published in the International Telecommunications Policy Review and in Medialex. Find more information in the publications section:
Latzer, Michael / Braendle, Andreas / Just, Natascha / Saurwein, Florian (2010): Public-Service Broadcasting Online: Assessing Compliance with Regulatory Requirements. In: International Telecommunications Policy Review, 17(2), 1-25 [more]
Latzer, Michael / Braendle, Andreas / Just, Natascha / Saurwein, Florian (2010): SRG Online Beobachtung: Konzessionskonformität von Webseiten und elektronischen Verbindungen. In: medialex, 15(2), 77-83 [more]
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The Division on Media Change & Innovation of the IPMZ continues the monitoring and assessment of the SRG Internet offer in 2010. The project SRG Online Assessment 2010 is commissioned by the Swiss regulator BAKOM as part of its Media Research 2010 special focus on the continuous program analysis of television, radio and online offers of the SRG. The study’s focus is–in replication of its 2009 analysis–on the extent of compliance of the SRG online services with the regulatory requirements of the charter (e.g., relation of online offers to broadcasts, no commercial links). It builds on a methodological approach, which has been developed and applied for the SRG Online Assessment 2009 and conducts a content analysis to give insights into the structure and functioning of the websites of five SRG enterprise units, and a link analysis to capture the intensity of electronic linking and the pattern of interconnection with other websites. The replication of the analysis will show first trends of development and change.
For more information see the project website. Results will be available by the end of 2010.
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The research report on the utilization of the Digital Dividend in Austria, conducted by Michael Latzer together with Arne Boernsen (AB Consulting), Tim Braulke (Infront Consulting & Management) and Joern Kruse (Helmut-Schmidt University, Hamburg), has been published by the Austrian regulator RTR. The responsible Austrian minister has already announced that she will follow the study’s recommendations and award the available spectrum for broadband mobile communication.
The Digital Dividend, a product of digitalisation and convergence in the communications sector, denotes those frequencies that are freed up as a result of the switchover from analogue TV to more spectrally efficient digital TV. The digital dividend spectrum is suitable for a wide range of potential uses. The political decision how this valuable freed up spectrum is used for mobile communication (e.g. broadband internet) and/or for broadcasting (e.g. HDTV) is heavily debated worldwide.More:
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Convergence Revisited - New Paper by Michael Latzer in Convergence
28th November 09Convergence - The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies - features a new article by Michael Latzer. It revisits the nature and governance implications of the convergence phenomenon more than a decade after it gained major prominence.
Latzer, Michael (2009): Convergence Revisited: Toward a Modified Pattern of Communications Governance, In: Convergence – The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 15 (4), 411-426
Abstract: This paper revisits the nature and governance implications of the convergence phenomenon more than a decade after it gained major prominence in politics and research. It analyses the reforms undertaken in reaction to convergence, outlines their common features, and argues that a worldwide trend towards a modified common governance pattern for convergent communications markets is emerging. The major constituent components include integrated strategies, control structures and legal frameworks for the convergent communications sector; a technology-neutral functional taxonomy; a subdivision into transmission and content regulation; and a growing reliance on alternative modes of regulation such as self- and coregulation.More