Concetta M. Stewart

Framing the digital divide: a comparison of US and EU policy approaches:

This article explores key US and European Union policy documents to identify the similarities and differences in the way that the digital divide has been defined in both contexts in recent years. To that purpose, a computer-assisted text analysis was conducted, which identified not only the most frequent relevant terms in each document, but also patterns of semantic association among them. While significant differences related to the political specificities of each context were found, both sets of documents revealed a tendency over time to frame access in economic and market-based terms. The article argues that these results provide useful insights into the study of the globalization and homogenization of telecommunications policymaking.

The City Park as a Public Good Reference for Internet Policy Making

Extensive literature has provided evidence of the organic nature of the Internet as a domain for different sorts of activities. Most policy making regarding the Internet, however, has focused on its economic dimensions (e.g. e-commerce, copyrights, privacy) while taking timid steps when it comes to its cultural and social dimensions. We propose a more comprehensive approach for global policy making on the Internet by looking retrospectively at processes that led to the creation of urban parks, and examining those processes in light of public goods theory. We conducted historical and theoretical analyses to show that, in the same way urban parks define spaces that mediate between different functions of the city, it is possible to define buffer spaces within the Internet that mediate between competing spheres of activity. As a complex phenomenon involving infrastructure, applications, and content, the Internet possesses features that can be located at different points between purely private and purely public goods. This fact parallels the growing attention that public goods theorists are paying to non-economic factors to explain the provisions of goods under circumstances that do not easily fit supply/demand laws. We argue that urban parks, as hybrid public goods, offer a reference for the design of policies that harmonize competing interests because they are spaces justified by manifold rationales (economic, political, social and cultural). As parks offer possibilities for spontaneous re-appropriations of the city as a cohesive entity (i.e. something beyond a disconnected collection of populations), defining similar multi-purpose spaces on the Internet would facilitate coexistence of competing and complementary behaviours by allowing users to re-appropriate this technology as a comprehensive entity beyond a mere aggregation of transactions and interests.

Conceptualizing Community: Implications for Policymaking in a Cyberage

Discussion surrounding the development of telecommunications policy has typically been framed in terms of communities of access and of interest. Indeed, communication technologies are often understood as a supplement to face-to-face communication, which is empirically understood as the basis for social interaction and the establishment of community (see McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). The Internet is no exception. There are, however, various and often competing definitions of “community” with respect to the Internet, thereby raising serious questions for both public policy and political activity, including but not limited to the following: What does it mean to be a citizen in this new cyberage? (See Jones, 1995; 1997.) With what rights is a cyber-citizen endowed? (See Etzioni, 2004.) What is public space? (See Stewart, Gil-Egui and Pileggi, 2004a; 2004b). What is communal? (See Fulk, et al., 1996).

Applying the Public Trust Doctrine to the Governance of Content-Related Internet Resources

This article explores the feasibility of applying the public trust doctrine (PTD) to the management of portals and search engines and discusses these tools’ crucial role for the materialization of the e-commons. The PTD establishes that certain resources are to be publicly owned and preserved because they are deemed essential for society. Through a theoretical and historical analysis of the doctrine, the authors contend that it is also possible to extend its application to cyberspace as a way to protect users’ right to navigate the Internet’s main gateways and roadways without ‘pay-per-placement’, targeted categorizations and other obstructions imposed by commercial web resources to access content.