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International Telecommunications Society Twelth Biennial Conference at Stockholm (Sweden), June 21 to 24, 1998
Christopher T.Marsden
This three-and-a-half day conference, organised with superb efficiency by the Stockholm School of Economics Centre for Information and Communications, the City of Stckholm, Telia AB and the ITS itself, was memorable for:
The divergence of viewpoints represented by computer, telecoms and broadcast industry experts will continue to be debated. In four super sessions, and eight parallel sessions of nine instalments each, over two hundred papers were presented. Despite the wealth of technology available, especially the excellent website, your correspondent read, attended and presented perhaps fifty papers. This is of necessity a very selective examination from a personal viewpoint, based on Parallel Sessions 2.1 (Convergence and Market Structure), 3.5 and 3.8 (Regulatory Regimes), Parallel Themes 7 and 8. Apologies for omission are offered to participants and browsers searching for Themes 1, 4, 5, and 6.There were several dichotomies which emerged during the conference, which highlight some of the definitional inconsistencies and disagreements which plagued many sessions. It was these same conflicting worldviews which contributed to the enrichment of the experience - telecoms and TV may not have interacted, but economists and lawyers, corporate and academic worlds certainly did.
Regulation vs Deregulation
The original "netizen" anarchists viewed all regulation as abhorrent, while the most libertarian of public policy analysts tended to agree that minimal regulation is essential to enable consumers and businesses to trust their web transactions, whether human or commercial. Security and encryption is one area: more contentious are privacy, pornography, speech and commerce issues. Copyright protection remains a crucial component of effective cyper-society.
Telecommunications Infrastructure vs Content Provision
As expected the economics of infrastructure dominated many telco sessions; content concerns are however presumably the new interest on the Net - both computer software and television-style video and audio. There was perhaps too little structure in the way in which content issues were interspersed with the 'core competence' of the conference. Notable contributions were Dimitri Ypsilanti, David Allen and (for chutzpah) Korinna Patelis.
Economics of Networks vs Public Policy of Regulation
Here, the lawyers met the economist over the bodies of the political scientists: a scrap between fundamentalism and incrementalism. As always, inertia will out. The lawyers attempted to break it to the idealists in as gentle a way as possible. A notable attempt was the paper of Barbara Cherry and Steven Wildman, as also that of Demetris Ioannidis, and Tom Spacek.
USA vs The World
In Super Session I, on the first morning, Edward Molloy of the White House Internet Taskforce presented the largely cooperative and self-regulatory view of the Clinton Presidency of convergence. This view was reiterated by many US speakers. In contrast, lawyers from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the European Union expressed the prevailing public policy view that some regulation was inevitable, which was also the opinion of many political economists from the US. This difference, though robustly expressed by some, was more an expression of differing views of political realities in the mature democracies. Though economics is called the dismal science, it was the dismal task of lawyers and political scientists to explain the limits of freedom even in cyperspace. Whatever the eventual outcome of the regulatory process, economic and technical models will form only the first stage in the process.
Democracy vs 'T-Electronic Commerce'
The conference was also divided between those pursuing speech-based issues (whether telephony, Internet communication or pay-TV) and those attempting to model the economic advances which Internet commerce undoubtedly promises. A particularly heroic attempt to square this particular circle was Todd Hartman's paper detailing the commercial free speech jurisprudence of the US First Amendment. Marketing on the Internet was the subject of one of the eight parallel themes.
Internet Archetype vs Pay Television Archetype
For the most part, the former model of convergence between computing and telecoms prevailed, in the case particularly of Internet telephony, and the ubiquitous Internet Service Providers under the US Telecoms Act of 1996. The real issue was market access and regulatory asymmetry, which were the broad issues addressed by those more concerned with broadcasting meeting telecommunications. Campbell Cowie and myself (cf. ijclp_webdoc_6_1_1998.html) made a 'heroic assumption' in comparing the Microsoft/Netscape battle in the US with nascent navigator wars on European digital TV screens.
Overall, Eli Noam, the outstanding outspoken speaker at the conference, regretted the lack of theory evident. While much useful interdisciplinary analysis was presented, there was no all-embracing 'Unified Convergence Theory'. Given that on 21-23 June:
The one outstanding success was the student prizewinner, Christian Hogendorn of Wharton Business School. Your correspondent was the first to congratulate him, for the simple reason that we were both on stage as finalists, and he took the $2000 cheque that I had hoped for! It may be that unifying theories and more defined interchanges are evident at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference from 3-5 October in Washington. Your correspondent will report at that stage. In the meantime, conference delegates were left with the beauty of Swedish midsummer 'white night' from Ericsson AB's launches in the Stockholm archipelago: virtual reality has much work to compete with that experience.