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Important Cyberlaw & Info-Tech Policy Books (2012 Edition)
by Adam Thierer on December 17, 2012 · Add a Comment
The number of major cyberlaw and information tech policy books being published annually continues to grow at an astonishing pace, so much so that I have lost the ability to read and review all of them. In past years, I put together end-of-year lists of important info-tech policy books (here are the lists for 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011) and I was fairly confident I had read just about everything of importance that was out there (at least that was available in the U.S.). But last year that became a real struggle for me and this year it became an impossibility. A decade ago, there was merely a trickle of Internet policy books coming out each year. Then the trickle turned into a steady stream. Now it has turned into a flood. Thus, I’ve had to become far more selective about what is on my reading list. (This is also because the volume of journal articles about info-tech policy matters has increased exponentially at the same time.)
So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to discuss what I regard to be the five most important titles of 2012, briefly summarize a half dozen others that I’ve read, and then I’m just going to list the rest of the books out there. I’ve read most of them but I have placed an asterisk next to the ones I haven’t. Please let me know what titles I have missed so that I can add them to the list. (Incidentally, here’s my compendium of all the major tech policy books from the 2000s and here’s the running list of all my book reviews.)
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Phi Beta Iota: A total “WOW.”
Includes, in this order (click here to read reviews, below to reach Amazon page):
Rebecca MacKinnon – Consent of the Network: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
Susan Crawford – Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age
John Palfrey & Urs Gasser – Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems
Christopher Yoo – The Dynamic Internet: How Technology, Users, and Businesses are Transforming the Network
Brett Frischmann –Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources
and others.