Stephen D. McDowell

Globalization and policy choice: television and audiovisual services policies in India

Policies shaping the production and distribution of electronic broadcasting or audiovisual services in India have undergone tremendous changes from the 1980s to the 1990s. The number of channels and programming carried by Doordarshan, the state broadcaster, has grown. Private companies both from within and outside India now produce television programming and distribute it through direct broadcast satellites or cable television systems. The dominant account of the liberalization of audiovisual services policies in India focuses almost solely on the role of global economic forces and technical change. While policy choices have been constrained, many of these limitations arose from Indian decisions made about the role of broadcasting in the 1970 and 1980s, and from social and economic developments within India in the 1990s.

Mutiny on the bandwidth: the semiotics of statehood in the internet domain name registries of Pitcairn Island and Niue

The internet has evolved to have a complex top-level domain name system, in which generic top-level domains such as .com and .org coexist with country-code top-level domains such as .UK and .JP. In this article, the history and significance of this hybrid naming system is examined, with specific attention directed to the manner in which it simultaneously reproduces claims to globalism, state sovereignty, and the presumption of United States hegemony. It is found that the domain name system affirms the centrality of the sovereign state while concurrently challenging its underlying basis in an idealized nexus of nation, government, and territory. These themes are explored through case studies of two Pacific island microstate domains: .PN (Pitcairn Island) and .NU (Niue).

India's experiments in mobile licensing☆

Abstract India has tried several different ways to allocate portions of the radiomagnetic spectrum as part of its licensing policies for wireless services. An auction system, in which winning bidders were required to provide fixed fee payments for use of spectrum, was introduced in the early 1990s. This was replaced in 1999, after many companies could not meet license fee payments, by a revenue sharing plan. Given Indias continued telecommunications policy objective of expanding service availability to all parts of the country at affordable rates, in 2001 the decision was made to allow basic service license holders to use wireless technologies with limited mobility to complete the local loop connections to subscribers. Spectrum used to provide these services was allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, but with the condition that services be introduced simultaneously in rural, semi-urban, and urban regions. Indias different licensing arrangements reflect an ongoing negotiation and shifting regulatory bargain among public and private sector providers of Indias telecommunications services, the government, and the actual and potential consumers of these services.

Public interest groups and the Canadian information highway

The Information Highway Advisory Council (IHAC), a committee representing commercial and non-commercial interests, was struck by Industry Canada in 1994 to provide policy advice on advanced communications infrastructure and services. Public interest groups, that is non-profit advocacy organizations not directly tied to any business or industrial interests, also tried to provide input into and responses to the work of the IHAC. The formation and activities of the Coalition for Public Information and the Alliance for a Connected Canada, are representative of public interest activities in Canada. The nature and extent of participation of these groups in the work of IHAC can be seen as a gauge of the receptivity of the government to questions and issues that were not on its agenda, and of the declining legitimacy of the institutions of telecommunications governance in Canada.

Global communication and the post-statism of cyberspace: a spatial constructivist view

Scholars from a range of perspectives question how the system of sovereign, territorial states is being impacted by the rise of cyberspace, a domain of information flows that apparently transcends state boundaries. Opinions range from those of neorealists who view these flows as posing a fundamental threat to state integrity to neoliberals who view them as one more opportunity for international cooperation. In this article, we hold that both of these views are based upon a liberal conception of space wherein there is a diametric tension between social activities that occur within state territory and those that occur across or outside state boundaries. In contrast, we develop a spatial constructivist perspective wherein spaces of production and consumption and spaces of flows both are viewed as continually being reconstructed amid capitalisms dialectical tendencies toward fixity and mobility. We conclude by suggesting that while the rise of trans-boundary information flows in cyberspace does not represent a new challenge to the state system, it does represent the latest intensification of a long-standing tension, and that efforts to develop a regime that supports both capital fixity and mobility are likely to fall short of their goals.

Introduction to the Special Forum on Monetization of User-Generated Content: Marx Revisited

The identification of core characteristics of labor and value creation in the information society is complicated, specifically in regard to user-generated content in social media websites and networks of audience labor. The issues related to user-generated content raise a number of definitional questions that are fundamental for theory development. Core elements of this debate include the definitions and significance of user-generated content, labor, value, price, production, commodities, exploitation, and class, all of which are challenging to define in the context of information and knowledge activities. Each perspective article in this special issue brings something unique to questions about labor in the information society, contributing both to clarification of concepts and to theory-building regarding labor and value creation.

Non‐state governance and the Internet: civil society and the ICANN

Explores a number of the debates and justification used to support and advance non‐state governance of the Internet in the USA. Reviews public reports released leading up to the formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Concludes that the scope herein is restricted to the jurisdictions and reasoning stated in the policy papers leading to the formation of the ICANN.

Broadband Redux: 2013

Abstract As the first major federal intervention in improving high speed access to a resource increasingly identified as necessary to contemporary life, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) funds devoted to broadband represented a new chapter in building infrastructure in the country and in moving toward a next generation of network connectivity. Though intended to understand what the stimulus funding accomplished as part of this special issue, we realized that it would take several more years to complete the funded projects and to assess their impacts. This special issue explores aspects of the ARRA investments in broadband, and offers some comparisons with earlier assessments collected in special issues in Government Information Quarterly (GIQ, 2003; 2006).

The V‐Chip in Canada and the United States: Themes and variations in design and deployment

While the timing and thrust of V‐Chip policies pursued in Canada and the U. S. in the mid‐1990s were similar, specific ways that V‐Chip technologies were deployed varied significantly. Design and deployment choices reflected the technical and industrial context, regulatory dynamics, and legislative institutions and processes in each country. Modeled after closed captioning technologies, in Canada the V‐Chip was deployed in the cable decoder box, with the CRTC making key decisions. The V‐Chip was introduced in television sets in the U.S., with greater legislative involvement.

Advanced Wireless Services: Challenges for Telecommunications Policy and Regulation in India

Abstract The paper considers telecommunications regulatory and policy goals, Institutions, practices and outcomes, discussing ways to conceptualise and assess regulatory performance. This overview provides examples of a number of approaches to and models of tracking sector performance and regulatory performance. Current debates over wireless auctions and wireless policy are considered, including the Implications of policies In this sector for the implications of ICTs use for economic and social development. The delay in 3G auctions-and conflicts between policymakers and regulators-has affected the expansion plans of private players in the Indian telecom market. The anticipated revenue increase for both domestic and international players in the competitive telecom sector has also faced many setbacks. This record illustrates the challenges of introducing and assessing forms and practices of media regulation that, ideally, serve the public interests are at once independent of large public sector operators and large private sector concerns, and provide access to and the benefits of communication services to a variety of India’s user communities and citizen