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This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. Multiple market failures are endemic to public, social, and mixed infrastructures, and there is no convincing a priori justification for the opposing baseline, supporting a freedom to discriminate. In the end, reforming our approach to infrastructure policy requires much more than a public commitment to managing public, social, and mixed infrastructures as a commons, but this would be a significant step forward. Adopting a capacious view of infrastructure allows us to “see” the wide range of infrastructural resources that we too often take for granted. A demand-side approach assists in making this view more clear and helps explain why it is obscured by our current supply-side focus. Though different in important ways, roads, telecommunications networks, the atmosphere, and ideas are actually similar in very important ways as well. It is critical to appreciate the foundational, enabling role of these and many other shared infrastructures and to see how the same infrastructure policy issues arise across various systems and policy arenas.

Regional economic development is shaped by many policies, which are implemented by national governments, regional and state governments, and local governments. But local economic development policies in Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area since 1970 had little to do with the economic divergence of these two regions. In reality, many so-called economic development policies have little to do with economic development as such, instead emphasizing land use changes and competition for sales tax revenue rather than industry and job development. Many of the problems with local planning and development policies in the United States in general are exemplified by the comparison of the San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles.

This book describes how and why a combination of technological innovation, market strategies, and political entrepreneurship motivated developments, first in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and then in the rest of the world. Part I explains the political economy of domestic information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure policy. Part II investigates the political economy of global ICT evolution since the 1950s. Part III consists of three case studies that take a finer-grained look at global market governance. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in the book is presented.

This chapter, which presents a brief overview of the evolution of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure, argues that until about 2025, the United States will be able to lead the world’s choices about future policies. The implications of the inflection point for the ICT infrastructure are explained. The inflection point significantly changes competitive opportunities in the ICT industry, and also breaks ICT out of geographic and functional boxes, presenting new frontiers for applications. The chapter shows that the domestic governance of ICT infrastructure depends on global arrangements, and also suggests that the logic of changes in political economy and the architecture of global governance determine the world’s choices for ICT infrastructure policy.

This chapter examines the role of China’s economic infrastructure: that is, transportation, telecommunications, utilities, and power supply. As well as providing some background to the concepts of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘economic infrastructure’, the chapter looks in some detail at China’s infrastructure provision; infrastructure spending policy; the economic impact of infrastructure spending; and challenges for the future.

This chapter examines various approaches to ensuring a place for nonprofit culture online, drawing from the various noncommercial networking projects discussed elsewhere in the anthology, as well as the 1990’s National Information Infrastructure policy debates in the U.S. and subsequent private-sector efforts. It discusses the key elements required for a broadly collaborative effort to (1) identify, cultivate, and promote the digital art resources that already exist; (2) develop new online projects; and (3) weave these resources together in a fashion that allows both online and offline arts activities to receive the serious attention to study they deserve. In addition to enhanced public sector leadership and expanded private sector support, the chapter calls for a more systematic application of curatorial expertise to the online sector, along with substantial grassroots participation in identifying the most reliable cultural resources that are too often lost in the vast expanses of the commercialized Internet today.