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Since its inception Free Press has strived to create a world where people have the information and opportunities they need to tell their own stories, hold leaders accountable, and actively participate in policymaking. Progress on any important issue will be impossible without changes to the policies, laws and politics that created the media we have now. The only way to make such changes is by creating a broad, popular movement for media reform. To mobilize this movement Free Press uses an outside-in approach. For its Net Neutrality campaign Free Press relied upon the expertise and credibility of its “inside” experts, lawyers, researchers and advocates, while simultaneously mobilizing hundreds of organizational allies and millions of “outside” activists to sign petitions, call Congress and attend FCC hearings and local rallies. Though vastly outnumbered on Capitol Hill—and absent at industry cocktail parties at campaign fundraisers—Free Press has worked to connect with key congressional staffers, educate “grasstops” leaders, and conducted independent research and analysis. Whether working for Internet freedom in the U.S. or abroad, advocates won’t be able to enact the right policies unless we can motivate and mobilize millions of people to take up the larger cause.

This chapter discusses the changing political economy of policy in the United States. It reviews the political and economic logic of debates over telecom competition policy, such as the debates over “net neutrality,” content, and information-market policies. The United States is the initial focus of the chapter so as to keep the analysis manageable. The chapter suggests that the United States remains the leading market for a wide swath of information and communication technology (ICT) solutions, and also examines the political economy of initial American choices in response to modularity at the inflection point. It shows that it is a challenge to find a political formula in the United States that allows for easy clearance of digital rights, reasonable fair use, and efficient charging and disbursement of fees for uses of copyright.

This chapter shifts the focus to the third and final stabilization phase of the political communication cycle (PCC). During the stabilization phase, a new political communication order (PCO) takes shape through the building of norms, institutions, and regulations that serve to fix the newly established status quo in place. This status quo occurs when formerly innovative political communication activities become mundane, yet remain powerful. Much of the chapter details the pattern of communication regulation and institution construction over time. In particular, this chapter explores the instructive similarities and key differences between the regulation of radio and the internet, which offers important perspectives on the significance of our current place in the PCC and the consequences of choices that will be made over the next few years.

Chapter 4 brings into focus various structural threats to journalism, including monopoly control over media infrastructures, the loss of public interest protections, digital divides, and the “Facebook problem.” It examines how monopolies—from platforms to traditional conglomerates and broadband cartels—threaten the entire news media system. The chapter goes on to provide an overview of why media policy matters for journalism and how different ownership structures affect media content. It then concludes with an in-depth discussion of Facebook’s relationship to journalism and the different schools of thought on how we should rein in monopolies.

The final chapter of this book is tentative and exploratory. It explores issues that have recently come to the fore in India, but have not yet been analysed under the rubric of free speech law. Four issues are discussed. Bulk surveillance (which is quintessentially thought of as raising privacy concerns) impacts upon the freedom of speech, via the chilling effect. In an age where the Internet is replacing the town square and the public park as a preferred forum of speech, network neutrality and the actions of gatekeepers such as the ISPs have assumed free speech dimensions. Investigative journalism as a crucial aspect of the ‘checking value’ of free speech needs strong source protection laws. And lastly, copyright law, by vesting a monopoly of speech upon the rights-holder, ought to be examined under the rubric of free speech.

This chapter presents the first country case. The French example is illuminating because the EU procedural mandates were transposed into a policymaking environment traditionally described as “statist” and suspicious toward interest groups. This pattern has its origins in the French Revolution and the “republican” perception of the state which would squarely oppose the deliberative-participatory model of chapter 1. Chapter 3 examines how the EU push for new mechanisms of public accountability has translated into institutional practice in the electronic communications sector. It situates these developments in the historical context of the evolution of the French administrative model and state-society relations. It also discusses whether these new processes may gradually give rise to a different perception of the administrative state, one that will be more open to participatory influences in all sectors of administrative policymaking.

This chapter summarizes the key takeaways from the book and the utility of the political communication cycle (PCC) overall. Technological changes and political contexts matter a great deal in the process of political communication change, but nothing is as consequential as the political choices that political actors and organizations make. These behavioral motivations explain much of the difference in innovativeness over time between different types of organizations, like the campaigns, social movements, and interest groups detailed in chapters 5 through 7. The conclusion applies these historical lessons to the current status of political communication, clarifying where we now are in the recurring cycle, and explaining why our position within the stabilization phase matters for political actors and consumers of political communication alike. Finally, this chapter sketches three possible paths forward and highlights related areas that could become subjects of future studies.

This chapter studies the nature of the policy field and its impact on business-lobbying in the EU. Drawing from theories on institutional legitimacy and information-access it observes the variation in density and diversity across regulatory and (re)distributive policy fields, and committee hearings. Empirically, the chapter employs business group surveys, conducts meticulous analysis of a population of 12,000 interest groups lobbying preferences across multiple policy fields assessing their density and diversity as well as their clustering. It includes a case study on business diverse coalition building focusing on net neutrality. Finally, the chapter observes the distribution of business interests across the European Parliament’s committee hearings. In doing so, this chapter contributes to discussions on legitimacy and public policy, chameleon pluralism, business mobilization, and the nature of the policy good.

In this dialogue, the philosopher David Casacuberta starts out by reflecting on how, with the advent of digital technologies, people’s rights are threatened by new problems that require new solutions. He goes on to argue why rights cannot be reduced in the age of technology and Internet. He defends the reasons why access to the Internet should be totally anonymous and argues that cryptography could be a core element for achieving this. He then explains his idea about “privacy as dignity”, and why privacy needs to be redefined. Next, he talks about why we must oppose surveillance from a cultural point of view, - and that doing so is a matter of respect and dignity -, as well as why the right to encrypt is an individual right. Casacuberta finishes by explaining why at present we are culturally faced with the dilemma of collective security, and what consequences this will have for us.

This chapter describes the DC Commercial Internet. The ideal consists of economic liberty, market solutions to resource allocation problems, property rights over the Internet, and exploitation of positive externalities. The exemplar is the United States, especially its Supreme Court, which has judged networks as private spaces (‘walled gardens’) which can and should be monetized as their owners prefer. Such an approach, it is argued, will lead to greater innovation and value creation for the public, even at the cost of interoperability and net neutrality. Social networks have gained from this view, able to create closed networks within walled gardens benefiting from network effects to collect data about members. Facebook has offered free services in the developing world in order to bring more people online within its boundaries. An attempt to sell the .org domain to a private equity company, however, foundered. This model has been called ‘surveillance capitalism’.

The open vision of the Silicon Valley Open Internet is described and shown to be an exceptionalist view of the uniqueness of cyberspace. Openness is described in terms of standards, transparency, interoperability, decentralization, and permissionlessness, and illustrated by the debates between UNIX and GNU in the 1980s, leading to the development of the Linux operating system. Companies like Google and Facebook have reasons to be both open and closed. The Open Internet is related to the idea of information as a public good, with open data and freedom of information. Net neutrality, the idea that all data should be treated equally as it travels through the Internet, is introduced.

Administered systems involve regulation, while efficient markets in ideas require secure property rights and appropriate adjacent institutions. Disruptive technologies typically lead to institutional bottlenecks, which then require accommodations in legal rules and their enforcement. U.S. policy toward innovation and enterprise has always been distinguished by the central role of law and the judiciary. The evolution of legal rules and standards in the United States reveals a remarkable degree of flexibility and responsiveness to innovations. In the short run, the common law economized on legal adjustment costs through “adjudication by analogy,” whereas, in the long run, socioeconomic changes wrought by major inventions ultimately produced more fundamental adjustments in adjacent institutions. This institutional elasticity can be contrasted with the lack of transparency and rigidity that characterized most administered innovation institutions.