Dr. Laura DeNardis studies the invisible. In her new book, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Governance in the Age of Smart Devices, DeNardis lifts the veil of the Internet to make visible the arrangements of embedded power across cyber-physical systems. At a recent talk hosted by the MSU Quello Center in the Department of Media & Information in the College of Communication Arts & Sciences, DeNardis outlined the importance of Internet governance, and the misperceptions surrounding the term. “The term Internet governance is actually an oxymoron,” she said, adding “it’s not just about governments …. with the Internet, almost […]
Between 24-28 May, thousands of communication scholars from all over the world gathered for the 68th International Communication Association Conference in Prague, Czech Republic. The College of Communication Arts & Sciences had a particularly strong presence at the conference with more than 80 faculty and students presenting their research. The Quello Center’s Assistant Director Bibi Reisdorf and Research Fellow Laleah Fernandez were among those presentations with some of the results from the Quello Search Project. As part of the large program, the team working on the Quello Search Project, Grant Blank (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford), Elizabeth Dubois (Department […]
One major outcome of the new faculty joining the Department of Media and Information this academic year that been a coming together of a critical mass of very strong faculty key to social scientific research on the digital age. Suddenly, the Quello Center can enjoy a dramatic rise in the strength of faculty that can inform research, policy, and practice central to the Center’s focus on policy for the digital age. To ensure that these faculty are visible and recognized from afar, the Center has begun a new category of faculty, entitled Quello Research Fellows. The first four Fellows include […]
From discussions in courses and within the Quello Center Advisory Board, the Center has been developing a set of key issues tied to media, communication and information policy and practice. We’d welcome you thoughts on issues we’ve missed or issues noted that do not merit more sustained research and debate. Your feedback on this list would be most welcome, and will be posted as comments on this post. I. Innovation-led Policy Issues New Developments around Robotics and Artificial Intelligence: What are the implications for individual control, privacy, and security? Security is no longer so clearly a cyber issue as cyber […]
In an earlier post I described the BTOP Comprehensive Community Infrastructure (CCI) program as a “very good investment of public funds.” My reasons were twofold, the first one being that it expanded the availability of high-speed connectivity in underserved areas, including more than 42,000 miles of new and 24,000 miles of upgraded fiber infrastructure. The second was that research by ASR Analytics suggests that the CCI program accomplished this expansion in a way that addresses both forms of economic harm claimed by advocates on both sides of the special access regulation debate. As a result, I suggested “that the federal […]
In an earlier post I discussed Marjorie Kelly’s framework for distinguishing “generative” vs. “extractive” ownership models. In this post, I’ll try to further clarify this distinction by considering some key characteristics of community-owned local access networks in relation to Kelly’s framework (in my next post I’ll shift my focus to middle mile and special access fiber). To get started, I’ll reiterate one of my key working premises, that when an extractive ownership model is combined with a lack of competitive pressure or corrective regulation (as is currently the situation in much of the nation’s local access and special access markets), service […]
