The Division on Media Change & Innovation is excited to offer this new and cutting edge course in the Autumn term. Since the 1850s, governments, business, and civil society have established "rules of the game" governing international communication markets and cross-border information flows. Collectively, these frameworks define the global communications order. In recent years that order has been transformed by privatization, liberalization, and the Internet. This course will survey the evolution, political-economic power dynamics, and social impact of the global governance arrangements for telecommunications regulation, technical standardization, radio frequency spectrum, satellites, trade in goods and communication services, electronic commerce, intellectual property, mass media, Internet content, Internet domain names and numbers, cybercrime and security, privacy protection, and development, as well as the broader debates in the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society and Internet Governance Forum.    

The course will be taught by Dr. William Drake, who is a Senior Associate of the Centre for International Governance at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a co-editor of the MIT Press book series, The Information Revolution and Global Politics. Drake is a leading international scholar of global communications policy, and has a diverse background.  He has taught at Georgetown University and the University of California, San Diego in the USA; was a Senior Associate and Director of the Project on the Information Revolution and World Politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an influential foreign policy think tank in Washington DC; and has served as the elected president of a global civil liberties organization, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Drake is heavily involved as a public interest activist in a number of key global governance processes examined inthis course, such as the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and the UN’s Internet Governance Forum.  As such, in this course he will be presenting an “insider’s perspective” on the current geopolitics of governance, particularly with respect to the Internet.  He has also been involved in a number of related global networks and initiatives, such as the Global Internet Governance Academic Network and the International Summer Schools on Internet Governance.  You can read more about him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/williamjdrake  and watch his brief remarks at the UN’s 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm el Sheikh http://tinyurl.com/Drake-IGF09.

This course will be held biweekly on Mondays from 2 to 6pm. Course dates are:

• September 20
• October 4
• October 18
• November 1
• November 15
• November 29
• December 13

Course language is English.

More

• Vorlesungsverzeichnis 
• Bill Drake on LinkedIn
• Bill Drake’s Remarks at the UN’s 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm el Sheikh