Global Networks and Local Values: Chapter 10:Principles and Conclusions

Global Networks and Local Values
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	Metadata
	Preface
	Chapter 1:Introduction and Context
	Chapter 2:The Evolution of Global Networks
	Chapter 3:Understanding Local Values and How They Are Affected
	Chapter 4:Democracy and Political Institutions
	Chapter 5:Free Speech and the Internet
	Chapter 6:Privacy and Freedom of Information
	Chapter 7:The Impact of Global E-Commerce on Local Values
	Chapter 8:Governance in Cyberspace: Multi-Level and Multi-Actor Constitutionalism
	Chapter 9:Information Networks and Culture
	Chapter 10:Principles and Conclusions

Chapter 10:Principles and Conclusions

Principles and Conclusions

For reasons outlined in Chapter 1, the committee came to the conclusion early on that an exhaustive study of the impact of global networks on local values was not possible within the constraints of time, focus, and group composition under which it was operating. Nevertheless, in the course of the symposia it hosted and the discussions it held, the committee was able to make some tentative judgments about some of the pertinent issues that may serve as a starting point for later studies.

10.1 GOVERNMENTS AND THE EVOLUTION OF LOCAL VALUES

As noted in Chapter 3, the values of a society are both formal and substantive. Because the world is increasingly diverse and interconnected, the committee believes that modern societies are better served by values that emphasize process and mutual respect than by those that seek to establish orthodoxies. Such an emphasis would give priority to formal values over substantive ones, though substantive values continue to have importance in defining a society or culture.

Considerable historical evidence suggests that the values of a society change over time. Thus, rather than seeking an unchanging status quo in which social and cultural values are frozen for all time, governments of modern societies might well choose a role in guiding such evolution, while ensuring the existence of a healthy process that is conducive to such change.

Governments could choose to intervene directly in the process. However, direct government intervention is hard to legitimate in a liberal state where value formation is a social rather than a governmental process. In addition, a coherent plan is hard to design, especially if it seeks to change the overall balance among values. Governments may be able to implant a single new value in the minds of the citizens or erase a single older value, as totalitarian governments have shown. But affecting the processes as values evolve is a much more ambitious task, the pursuit of which would necessarily aim at controlling thought rather than action; such an attempt would be inappropriate for democratic societies striving to maintain the rule of law.

A second approach is to regulate the mechanisms that affect the process. Consider, for example, the Internet as a possible influence on the evolution of local values. Governments do have a continuing and long-term role in ensuring that, on balance and in aggregate, communication informs rather than manipulates, and that it serves the purposes of democratic society with respect to universal access and the balance of social and political power.

Nevertheless, the Internet is not the only influence on the evolution of values; there is a multitude of other influences. Thus the Internet policy of government should be part of a larger strategy aimed at promoting the healthy evolution of a society's value set, in response to the many changes occurring as that society becomes better educated, more diverse, and more fully connected to the wider world around it.

10.2 DEMOCRACY

Policy interventions to channel or direct the impact of global networks on democracy and political institutions are fraught with difficulty, and it would be naive to expect that political leaders would make neutral decisions where their own future power base is concerned. Even if that were not the case, it would still make sense to be cautious, even modest, about making explicit recommendations. The fact is that the structure and influence of global networks are constantly evolving, and the normative goals that would presumably be served by such policy efforts continue, as they have been for centuries, to be in dispute. Nevertheless, or perhaps with these caveats in mind, the committee concludes the following:

To the extent that policymakers believe that action is necessary, their focus should be on outcomes rather than on tools or modalities. Thus they should seek to define what outcomes are desirable and undesirable rather than seek to regulate one particular instrumentality such as the Internet. The Internet is only one factor, albeit an important one, in globalization and modernization.
Networks such as the Internet (that is, systems capable of multi-node generation and receipt of information) and broadcast media (that is, few generators to many recipients) each have, in principle, advantages and disadvantages in promoting democratic goals. Network-based information resources are probably more effective in providing access to information and to political forums, and to the maintenance of a plurality of ideas, although network users have the ability to determine what information reaches them, thus limiting what ideas can reach people. Broadcast media do a better job of integrating a society because they expose the broad population to a relatively common pool of information. Acting together, they can facilitate plurality with integration; they also provide certain checks and balances in the polity.
Global networks create new opportunities for direct democracy, and policymakers in each country should consider how these opportunities might best be used. They should decide how--and whether--direct and representative processes should be rebalanced to maximize legitimacy in both "input" (the voices of citizens) and "output"(policy actions resulting from those processes).
Policymakers should assess whether the postulated disintegrating effect of global networks is actually felt in their polities. Has there, for example, been a recent trend toward single-issue constituencies?
If global networks are seen as competing with established mechanisms for the provision of public goods, it becomes clear that research is needed into what one might call antitrust rules. The goal is to devise workable competition among the variety of political arenas.
Despite a host of pressures toward greater internationalization and multilateral activity (especially in the European Union), actual change may be slow and painful. Countries give up previously sovereign rights and powers only grudgingly, if at all.

10.3 REGULATORY STRUCTURE

An alternative to command-and-control regulation is the use of self-regulation and intermediation within a statutory framework. With hybrid regulation, a credible threat of state intervention stimulates self-regulatory activities, and overt state involvement is unnecessary once the self-regulatory activities are under way. (A supranational entity, an international organization, or well-organized societal forces may also have the same effect.) Because global networks are characterized by a complex system of private, public, and quasi-public forces, a stable system is easier to achieve when stakeholders can take an active part in shaping their roles. Command-and-control regulation often attacks a well-balanced status quo; because hybrid regulation builds on the status quo, it is more likely to be successful.

Improved prospects for a new hybrid system of governance for global networks are consistent with the shifting boundary between public and private international law. Policy statements by national governments, and the actual establishment of a number of hybrid regulatory approaches, are promising signs that new forms of international governance will help implement the recommendations of this report.

10.4 FREE SPEECH

As noted in Chapter 5, the United States and Germany both recognize a constitutional right to freedom of expression. However, the interpretations of that right in the two countries are significantly different. As importantly, the weights given to that right, in comparison with other values, are different in the two societies as well. As a result, the legal structures and protections that have developed to implement the right are also different, exemplifying why harmonization of nations' laws related to freedom of expression on the Internet is likely to remain quite difficult.

The nature of today's Internet is a significant impediment for national authorities who wish to unilaterally implement laws and regulations that reflect national substantive values. At the same time, national pride and substantive cultural values are unlikely to be abandoned, so that a homogenization of values among nations--particularly with respect to the most restrictive or the least--is also unlikely to occur.

There are some areas, such as child pornography, where there is more-or-less universal agreement on the substantive values to be protected. International treaties that harmonize rules appear to be well within reach for these few, but important, areas. Generally, the more homogeneous the group of nations, the more likely it is that treaty solutions covering content will be practical. Even if the group of nations is small, it can still be useful in providing a model for harmonization and a bloc for bringing pressure on nonsignatory nations to respect the treaty's provisions.

To reduce the tensions and chaos that national differences create for a global activity, governments could cooperate in a number of ways. Nations could work together to discourage content providers from using the regulatory environment of one country to circumvent the regulations of another. They could establish an international information agency (or support private or quasi-public organizations) to help providers understand each nation's regulatory standards and structures. Finally, they could update and extend to the networked world the mechanisms that currently exist for dealing with circumstances in which domestic laws conflict.

Given the limited effectiveness of unilateral command-and-control rules regulating content, commercial law, self-regulation, and encouragement of intermediation (perhaps driven by the threat of imposing regulation) are options for national action in the appropriate circumstances.

Commercial law is a useful tool when material on the network injures a clearly identifiable party (e.g., a Web site has published libelous material about a person or has violated a person's legally protected privacy). However, ccommercial law does not work well if large groups are indirectly or only potentially affected--for example, when child pornography endangers children, hate speech intimidates minority groups, or Nazi ideology threatens democratic government.
Voluntary self-regulation on the part of the parties directly exposed to material on the Internet--through site-identification and labeling schemes, age-verification software, or the provision of filtering software, for example--is attractive in some ways, because it offers the potential for greater diversity of material to be accessible through the Internet, enhanced freedom of expression, and customization of controls to fit the needs and desires of the individuals involved.
Intermediaries, such as host providers, can play a useful role in offering the public a regulating or authenticating service. That is, host providers can market their Internet access software by promising to include certain kinds and quality of content and exclude others. Hosts would compete with each other on the basis of the cluster of options they offer as well as over their software-based filtering systems (although the rigidity of these latter technical tools is a clear disadvantage).

Finally, government should provide means for improving the media competence of the users. An oversight function for government will remain important in striking a balance between the preservation of the individual right of freedom of expression and other legitimate goals of a democratic society.

10.5 PRIVACY

Privacy regulation must cover both online and offline transactions, either through the Internet or private networks, and must include comprehensive and consistent protection regardless of whether data are collected, held, manipulated, or disseminated by public sector or private sector entities. The United States faces particular challenges in this respect because its many sector-specific regulatory approaches are so different from (and indeed often inconsistent with) each other.

The existence of transborder data flows creates a strong need for harmonization, or at least convergence, of national legislative regimes, particularly among developed countries. Because the United States and Germany, as well as Europe more generally, share a number of values concerning privacy rights, harmonization is not out of the realm of possibility. However, subtle but important differences in cultural views about the appropriate role of the government make it unlikely that explicit, uniform, legislatively based regulations will ever be agreed on.

Hybrid approaches that combine self-regulation with a legislative framework that establishes general principles--as well as mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement--appear much more likely to provide flexibility, customization, and quick-response capability in the dynamic world of global networks.

10.6 FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

There are few international tensions related to inconsistencies in national freedom-of-information laws, as this is an area in which individual nations can control compliance with their own statutes. However, freedom of information is so vital to the proper functioning of a democracy that it is reasonable to endorse an upward harmonization of national standards toward the comprehensive law-based regime in place in the United States. That regime takes as a premise the right of citizens to access virtually all public documents (with narrowly drawn exceptions), though in practice the extent to which U.S. government agencies adhere to this regime varies widely. Among the few exceptions, in addition to national-security matters or judicial proceedings, are the privacy rights of individuals. Advances in technology make it generally easier to anonymize data in government records, thereby allowing their release without compromising privacy.

Primary legal information--including laws, judicial opinions, and administrative rulings--should not be excluded from freedom-of-information regimes merely to protect a property interest of a private entity that uses the data to create value-added databases. If copyright protection is granted to such entities, it should not cover the raw data on which the information product is based.

Government institutions should encourage the trend of using Web sites and the Internet to increase the availability of public information.

10.7 TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

The network of networks appears to be what The Economist, in July 1995, called "the accidental superhighway." In its early stages the Internet was promoted and funded, but not designed, by the U.S. government. At no time did some kind of master plan exist to guide the Internet's evolution. The history of the Internet's technology suggests that it would be a mistake for governments to seek to control the future development through comprehensive action plans. There are alternatives to centralized approaches, such as coordination and self-regulation, though these pose challenges both within particular countries and globally. Such approaches require accommodating new forms of hybrid public-private international regimes, which may be experimental in the near term (as discussed in Section 10.3).

The core of the Internet's technology--the TCP/IP protocol stack--developed in a niche that sheltered it from market selection for many years. This incubation was very useful, and it suggests that creating and protecting other niches may be beneficial in keeping options for technological development open. The challenge will be to provide suitable, timely exposure to market realities while avoiding the propping up of what might not be viable.

10.8 CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

Generally speaking, cultural hegemony arising from global networks does not appear to be a major concern for developed nations. Technologies are available that allow localization of the language and culture of networks, the cost of entry of information providers of all kinds is low, and saturation of available bandwidth by early users does not appear to be a serious problem.

There is more reason for concern about cultural hegemony with respect to nations in the developing world. Here, too, the technological capacity exists to localize networks, but the incentives to do so are often marginal. Moreover, in certain of these societies, networks may exacerbate social stratification, reinforcing the power of elites and upsetting cultural balances that have developed over time. Of particular concern is the possibility of "technological lock-in" during these next several years as the structure and use patterns of the Internet develop.

An untested postulate, put forward by a number of East Asian and Middle Eastern countries, is that there is a strong connection between their cultural values and their political structures--and that global networks can be a threat to both. An examination of how electronic networks have been adopted in the growing diasporas of ethnic groups from these countries might provide further insights on this question.

Global networks appear more likely to change the culture of and relationships between various groups within societies, as defined by profession and level of education rather than by national identity. These changes result from the groups' different ways of using the Internet, the different interdependencies among groups that thereby occur, and the consequent changes in the modes of operation of certain professionals that affect activities unrelated to electronic networks as well as those directly related to the networks.

Networks are profoundly challenging the traditional and culturally defined conceptions of public and private spaces. It is not yet clear whether this will lead to two worlds--real space and cyberspace--with different rules and mores concerning privacy, or whether there will be spillover effects that create tensions or changes in local cultural practices. A separate cyberworld of "Netizens" is not likely to achieve any permanence, even as electronic network penetration and use grow over the years to come.

Finally, many of the observations about the cultural effects of global networks are likely to be transitory. Global electronic networks will cause a sea change resulting more from continual, dynamic evolution than from any one-time adjustment that remains fixed. Thus, long-term changes in the nature of local culture are certainly probable, but not predictable on the basis of phenomena currently being observed.

Appendix

Biographies

A.1 COMMITTEE MEMBERS

KENNETH H. KELLER, Chair, directs the Center for Science, Technology, and Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He also holds an appointment in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. His research examines the intersection of science and technology with international politics and economics. His recent writings have dealt with technology and national sovereignty, the environment, the globalization of research and development, and policy issues in high technology medicine. He has spent most of his career at the University of Minnesota where he joined the faculty in 1964, became vice president for academic affairs in 1980, and University president in 1985. He was senior fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1990 to 1996. He has chaired and served on a number of public and private boards and advisory groups and is a member of the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications of the National Research Council, and the boards of RAND's Institute for Education and Training and the Science Museum of Minnesota. He chairs the Medical Technology Leadership Forum and is vice chair of the board of LASPAU: Academic and Professional Programs for the Americas. He earned a master's degree and doctorate in chemical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and was named a distinguished Johns Hopkins alumnus in 1996.

KENNETH W. DAM is Max Pam Professor of American and Foreign Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Mr. Dam was elected to the Order of the Coif while at the Law School; he was also a managing editor of the Law Review. In 1964, he was visiting professor at the University of Freiburg. Mr. Dam has published five books: Federal Tax Treatment of Foreign Income (with Lawrence Krause); The GATT: Law and International Economic Organization; Oil Resources: Who Gets What How?; Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines (with George Shultz); and The Rules of the Game: Reform and Evolution in the International Monetary System. He was law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Whittaker and then an associate with the New York firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore. He joined the Law School faculty in 1960, but in 1971 he left to become assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget, where he was concerned with national security and international affairs. In 1973, he was executive director of the Council on Economic Policy, which was responsible for coordination of U.S. domestic and international economic policy. He returned to the University of Chicago Law School in 1974. He served as provost of the university from 1980 to 1982. He served as deputy secretary of state from 1982 to 1985 and then as vice president for law and external relations with IBM from 1985 to 1992. In 1992, he took leave from IBM to serve, on an interim basis, as president and CEO of the United Way of America in order to clean up a scandal in that organization and to put into place a new system of controls and governance. In early 2001 he was nominated by President Bush to be Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and he is currently on a leave of absence from the Law School.

PAUL A. DAVID is professor of Economics at Stanford University, and, since 1994, also holds a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He currently is Extraordinary Professor of the Economics of Science and Technology in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Maastricht. Paul David is known internationally for his contributions in several fields, including economic history, economic and historical demography, and the economics of science and technology. The development of "the new economics of science" has been a focal point of his most recent research and writings, and he continues to direct the High Technology Impact Program of the Center for Economic Policy Research at Stanford. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development, the United Nations University Institute on New Technologies, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and other public organizations.

KENNETH KENISTON is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Human Development and Director of Projects in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of seven books and more than 100 articles and chapters. His most recent works are, with D. Guston, The Fragile Contract (1994), and with J. Ker Conway and L. Marx, Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. He is the Director of the MIT India Project at MIT, a part of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative (MISTI). In recent years, Professor Keniston's research focused on information technology and development in India. His research in India focuses on such topics as Indic language software (or the absence therof), and on Indian projects and research to close the "digital divide" within India and between India and the so-called Northern nations. In the fall of 1999, he was Sir Ashutosh Mukerjee Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore; he has lectured at a number of Indian institutions including IIT-Chennai, IIT-Mumbai, the Confederation of Indian Industries, and private firms. He was a member, Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (1964-1971); director, Behavioral Sciences Study Center, Yale Medical School (1967-1971); chairman and director, Carnegie Council on Children (1971-1977), author of its report, All Our Children; and member, Board of Overseers of Harvard University (1973-1979); Guggenheim Fellow for study of engineering education (1982); evaluator, Guggenheim Foundation for Latin American applicants (1988-); member, Committee of Selection for the MacArthur Prize Fellowships (1973-1979); member, Committee of Selection for the Guggenheim Fellowships (1991-1994). He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Ecole des Mines (Paris); Visiting Professor at the University of ParisV (Sorbonne); Visiting Professor at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Ciencias Sociales (Madrid). He has been a consultant on a number of projects in Venezuela, Kuwait, Mendoza (Argentina), Malaysia, Politecnico of Torino, Italy, Petroleum Institute in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He is currently a member of the National Research Council/Max-Planck-Institute (American-German) working group on Global Networks and Local Values. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Keniston was educated in part at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires (Central). He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, with a thesis on the political philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset. He received his D. Phil. in Social Studies from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College. He has taught at Harvard University, where he was a Junior Fellow; in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Yale University; and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been Director (1986-1992) and Director of Graduate Studies (1992-1996) of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

HENRY H. PERRITT, JR., is dean of Chicago-Kent College of Law and vice president of the Downtown Campus of Illinois Institute of Technology. He is the author of more than 70 law review articles and 15 books on technology and law and employment law, including the 730-page Law and the Information Superhighway. He served on President Clinton's Transition Team, working on telecommunications issues, and drafted principles for electronic dissemination of public information, which formed the core of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments adopted by Congress in 1996. During the Ford Administration, he served on the White House staff and as deputy under secretary of labor. He serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Policy Board of the National Research Council. He was a member of the interprofes-sional team that evaluated the FBI's Carnivore system. He is a member of the Bars of Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Illinois and the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and of the Economic Club and is secretary of the Section on Labor and Employment Law of the American Bar Association. He earned his B.S. in engineering from MIT in 1966, a master's degree in management from MIT's Sloan School in 1970, and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1975.

ROBERT SPINRAD retired from XEROX Corporation, as Vice President of Technology Strategy in 1998. He joined Xerox in 1968, and over the years has held a variety of computer science positions, including that of Director of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Before his career with Xerox, Spinrad was a Senior Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Project Engineer at Bulova Research and Development Laboratory. Spinrad received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering, and B.S. in Engineering from Columbia University. Spinrad was a Bridgham Fellow at Columbia and a Whitney Fellow at MIT. Spinrad has served in various advisory and oversight roles at Harvard University, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, EDUCOM, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Council on Foreign Relations, Bell Telephone Laboratory, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, Livermore National Laboratory, the RAND Corporation, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Digital Pathways, Inc., the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, and The Information Society. Spinrad is on the Board of Advisors for the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and on the National Reconnaissance Office Advisory Council. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council's United States/Japan Task Force on Corporate Innovation.

A.2 THE GERMAN DELEGATION

CHRISTOPH ENGEL, Chair of the German Delegation, was born in 1956, and he took the first state exam for lawyers in 1981 at Tuebingen University. After 2 years as assistant at the Tuebingen Law Faculty, he was for 9 years a research fellow of the Hamburg Max-Planck-Institute on foreign private law and conflicts of law. He took his second state exam for lawyers in 1987 and received a degree of doctor juris in 1988. In 1992, the University of Hamburg gave him tenure (habilitation) for public law, economic law, European law, and public international law. From 1992 through 1997, he held a chair for media and communications law at Osnabrueck University. Since 1997 he is co-director of a newly founded institution within the Max-Planck-Society, the Project Group on the Law of Common Goods at Bonn. His main fields are public law, economic law, media law, environmental law, and the impact of social sciences, in particular economics, on law. He is a member of the Scientific Council with the German Minister of Economics.

KLAUS W. GREWLICH is a professor in the European General and Interdisciplinary Department at the College of Europe/Bruges. From 1990 to 1995 he served as Executive Vice President (Director General) Business Development and Board Representative at Deutsche Telekom, Bonn and from 1996 to 1997 as Director General and Member of the Board of an Industrial Confederation in Brussels. Dr. Grewlich has held positions in the European Space Agency and in the OECD Madrid, in the Cabinet of the EC Commission in Brussels, and was Member of the Foreign Policy Planning Group and Director for International Technology and Telecommunications Policy in the Federal Foreign Office, Bonn. He received his Dr. Jur. from the University of Freiburg, his Dr.sc.econ. from the University of Lausanne/HEC, and his LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr Grewlich is the author of various publications, particularly in the field of international economic relations, public international and European law, international technology policy, government-business relations, and communications, including the books Direct Investment in the OECD-Countries (1978), Transnational Enterprises in a New International System (1980), Europe in the Global Technology Race (1992), Conflict and Order in Global Communications (1997), and Governance in Cyberspace (1999).

BERND HOLZNAGEL is a professor of law and director of the Institute for Information, Telecommunication and Media Law at the University of Münster, Germany. After completing his law and sociological studies at the Free University in Berlin in 1984, he participated in a post-graduate law program at McGill University in Montreal where he received a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree in 1985. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg on Dispute Resolution through Negotiation in 1990 and passing the second state exam in law in 1991, he began to write his thesis, "Broadcasting Law in Europe," which was completed in 1996 and received a special award from the European Group at Public Law. In 1997 he was announced as professor for constitutional and administrative law at the University of Münster. In the same year he founded the Institute for Information, Telecommunication and Media Law. His involvement in research projects covers areas such as access problems in the multimedia age, legal frameworks of data protection and data security, and new media in university teaching. In 1998 he was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) teaching "European Community Law" in the fall term. Since 1999, he has been a faculty member of Oxford University's summer school for incoming law students. His consulting work on the international level includes media law courses in Moscow and Ljubljana (with the Council of Europe), as well as working as an expert on the legal problems concerning Bosnian election law, residence law, data protection and I.D. cards (with the Phare Project financed by the European Commission). Furthermore, he was a member of the European Expert Group for the preparation of the Working Group "The Right Regulatory Framework for a Creative Media Economy" at the April 1998 Birmingham Conference organised by the European Community. Currently he is a co-editor of the Law Journal "Multimedia and Law" and co-initiator of the "International Journal of Communications Law and Policy," which is a joint project of the Universities of Münster, Oxford, Warwick, and Yale. In addition, he has published numerous articles in several German law journals relating to various problems concerning German administrative law.

MICHAEL HUTTER is professor of economic theory and director of the Institute for Economy and Culture at Witten/Herdecke University, the first private university in Germany. He received his Dr. rer.pol. with a summa-cum-laude thesis on the logical structure of property rights and his Dr. rer. pol. habil. with a study on the production of pharmaceutical patent law in Germany, Italy, and the United States. His current research interests focus on the role of communication in economic theory, and on applications of social systems theory on the economics of the Arts, media industries and networks, and monetary systems. Dr. Hutter was educated at Portland State University (B.A. Math., 1970), University of Washington (M.A. Econ., 1971), and the University of Munich (Dr. rer. pol., 1976, and Dr. rer. pol. habil., 1986). He taught at Claremont McKenna College and at the University of Munich before joining the faculty of Business Administration and Economics at Witten/Herdecke University in 1987. He was dean of the faculty from 1992-95, and he was president of the Association for Cultural Economics. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Cultural Economics, the European Journal of Law and Economics, and Soziale Systeme. He has published in the areas of cultural economics, history and theory of money, history of economic thought and economic methodology.

RAYMUND WERLE is principal research associate with the Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln (Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne). He is head of the MPI Research Group on Network Development and Standardization in Telecommunications. His research is focused on the institutional conditions and the structural consequences of technological and scientific innovations, in particular in the information and telecommunications technology industry. It includes the development of telecommunications and data networks, the Internet in particular, and their structural and societal consequences. He has published in the area of science and technology studies, development and governance of large technical systems, but also in the sociology of law and the legal profession and research methodology. He received a Diploma (M.A.) in Economics and Sociology and a Ph.D. in Political Science. He was educated at the Universities of Bonn, Cologne, Mannheim and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (postgraduate DAAD fellow). He held research and teaching positions at the Universities of Bielefeld, Mannheim and Heidelberg and at the Research Center on Nuclear Energy in Karlsruhe. In 1997 he was Visiting Scholar at the Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development (Research Program on Communications Policy) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is chair of the Coordination Committee of the Research Network "Sociology of Science and Technology" (SSTNET) of the European Sociological Association.

A.3 STAFF

JOACHIM D&OUML;LKEN is a research assistant with the Max-Planck-Project Group on the Law of Common Goods at Bonn and currently enrolled in the preparatory program ("Rechtsreferendariat") for the second state exam for lawyers. He received his first law degree (J.D. equivalent) with a focus on commercial and competition law in 1995 from Osnabrück University. Since 1992, he was a junior research assistant with the chair for the Law of the New Media at Osnabrueck University. From 1995-1996, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago Law School (ERP-scholarship of the Ministry of Economics and the National Scholarship Foundation). His work is on antitrust law related to convergence in multimedia markets.

HERBERT LIN is senior scientist and senior staff officer at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies, where he has been study director of major projects on public policy and information technology. These studies include a 1996 study on national cryptography policy (Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society), a 1991 study on the future of computer science (Computing the Future), a 1999 study of Defense Department systems for command, control, communications, computing, and intelligence (Realizing the Potential of C4I: Fundamental Challenges), and a 2000 study on workforce issues in high-technology (Building a Workforce for the Information Economy). Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He also has significant expertise in math and science education. He received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1979. Apart from his CSTB work, he is published in cognitive science, science education, biophysics, and arms control and defense policy.

LORENZ MÜLLER is Higher Executive Officer in the administration of the German Bundestag on temporary leave of absence. He was Research Assistant of the Parliamentary Study Commission "Future of the Media in the Economy and Society--Germany´s Road into the Information Society," which finished his work in June 1998. After 4 years as a journalist, he studied law and arabic and islamic studies in Hamburg and Damascus. He took his first and second state exam for lawyers in 1991 and 1995 in Hamburg and received a degree of doctor juris in 1996 with a thesis on the relationship between modern islamic theory and the idea of human rights. Currently he is a Research Assistant with the Max-Planck-Project Group on the Law of Common Goods at Bonn.

WOLF OSTHAUS, born in 1971, received his first law degree (J.D. equivalent) with a focus on international private law and comparison of law in 1997 from Osnabrueck University after studying at the Universities of Osnabrueck, Paris (XII), and Florence. He is a research assistant with the Max-Planck-Project Group on the Law of Common Goods at Bonn and also a member of the Graduate College "Internationalization of private law" at the University of Freiburg/Germany (DFG scholarship). His Ph.D. thesis, which is supervised by Prof. von Bar, Osnabrueck, will be on the rights to information in the international tort law.