Law and Information Platforms

This symposium presents an ideal “platform” to support the launch of a new journal focused on telecommunications and high technology law. Unlike more established areas of the law, the field of telecommunications or, as more aptly termed, information law, is not easily defined. To be sure, there is an ambitious statutory code (the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, most notably by the Telecommunications Act of 19961) and an agency charged with administering it (the Federal Communications Commission). There is even a leading casebook for teaching “Telecommunications Law.”2 But as the history of telecommunications makes clear, legal regulation of this industry defies easy categorization, as it strays across legal spheres— into antitrust, intellectual property, and First Amendment law— as well as into non-legal disciplines—into principles of engineering and economics, for example. With the rise of the Internet and recent advances in information technology, businesses, lawyers, and scholars have focused on how to create and implement a new regulatory regime premised on competition and technological convergence.3 Over time, this new regime will begin to transform telecommunications regulation into a particularized form of antitrust; that is, rather than follow its traditional role of addressing market power concerns directly, telecommunications regulation will increasingly