Information Society Watch

2006, Yochai Benkler,Yale University Press

This book is a useful guide to the networked information economy and an eloquent statement of the left-liberal conception of the Internet’s “institutional ecology”.

2000, Lucas D. Intron & Helen Nissenbaum, The Information Society

This article argues that search engines raise not merely technical issues but also political ones. The study reveals that search engines systematically exclude (by design and/or accidentally) certain sites, and certain types of sites, in favour of others, systematically give prominence to some at the expense of others.

January 2008, Maureen O’Sullivan, First Monday

This article examines the historic trajectory of copyright from a common law to a statutory privilege and charts the emergence of Creative Commons in response to the expansion (in the term and scope) of copyright law.

January 2007, Tim Wu & Christopher Yoo, Social Science Reseach Network

In the following exchange, Professors Tim Wu and Christopher Yoo engage in an informative debate over the merits of network neutrality that reviews the leading arguments on both sides of the issue.

November 2008, Jaffrey Rosen, NY Times

This news article investigates and draws out revelations for taking stock of Google's avatar as a gatekeeper and the implications for free speech on Internet as well as the increasingly pertinent question of regulation-by whom and how?

Winter 2008, Sascha D. Meinrath & Victor W. Pickard, International Journal of Communications Law & Policy

The meteoric rise of network neutrality's prominence as a crucial Internet policy debate has led to current events far outpacing theoretical and historical analyses. This paper addresses this lag in scholarship by contextualizing recent events in relation to historical telecommunications antecedents. In doing so, the authors critically evaluate the current network neutrality debate and offer a set of technical and policy guidelines for a new, more broadly defined network neutrality.

July 7, 2008, Linda Jean Kenix, First Monday

Although research has urged scholars and practitioners to develop the Internet as a democratic tool, little research has examined how users actually use the Internet and how the Internet is conceptualized by those who create its content - particularly in the non-profit sector where questions of democracy, interconnected communication and information gathering are often central to survival.

Wintern 2008, Gerard Goggin, International Journal of Communications Law and Policy

Internet and media convergence has been for sometime concentrated on mobile technologies. Most notable, perhaps, has been the emergence of a cluster of online, mobile data and content services and technologies that have been precursors of fully-fledged mobile media themselves. With these important, lucrative, and potentially far-reaching developments in mind, this paper focusses on international approaches to regulation of mobile content with case studies of the US, Canada, Britain and Australia.As well as reflecting on the trends across these countries, the author also considers the implications of such regulation, and the new models of governance they represent, for questions of cultural citizenship.

September 16, 2008, Reuters

A researcher from a leading research organisation after analysing web searches of over 10 milliom web users has come to the conclusion that pornography which has till now been the most sought after search term on the Internet is falling and in fact being replaced by social networking sites which people are using to communicate with each other.

2008, James Grimmelmann

Web search is critical to our ability to use the Internet. Whoever controls search engines has enormous influence on all of us. Whoever controls the search engines, perhaps, controls the Internet itself.