Susan Crawford on Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry & Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age

What people said

fossuser · 2014-02 · Recommendation

That's interesting (didn't know about the whole city coverage). The general telecom issue is also gone over well in this talk called captive audience [ [VIDEO] ]. It goes over the telecom industry, how it's not competitive and the current day incentives/problems. While the underlying reason that this issue cannot easily be fixed appears to be related to a more fundamental problem with American campaign fundraising and how it creates a competing dependency that prevents any meaningful reform from moving forward. This Ted talk by Lawrence Lessig ( [LINK] ) gives a good overview of this problem.

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graedus · 2014-01 · Recommendation

Because it's considered "vertical integration" and therefore not subject to anti-trust laws. Comcast merging with Time Warner would be considered horizontal; Comcast merging with NBCU was considered vertical and therefore allowed to go forward in January 2011. I'm currently reading Susan Crawford's book Captive Audience, which is a detailed history of this exact topic. Recommended. Here's a talk she gave at Harvard summarizing the story and issues at stake: [VIDEO]

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cameron913 · 2013-07 · Recommendation

A talk on the book in question (as well as audio) can be found here: [LINK] and if you prefer YouTube, here: [VIDEO] It's a pretty good overview of the American broadband infrastructure problem.

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