50th Anniversary of TPRC—Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy: Looking Ahead to the Next 50 Years

Abstract

Dear JIP reader,This Special Section of the JIP celebrates the 50th anniversary of a gathering of communications professionals, regulators, and researchers first held in 1972, convened by the Office of Telecommunications Policy in The White House, and originally called the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, subsequently renamed TPRC, and currently called TPRC—The Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy. The name changes reflect the ways in which the Conference has evolved and expanded.With 50 years of history of engaging policy makers with the best and most current research available on topics of importance to policy, legislation, and regulation behind it, the Editors believed that it would be a good time to look ahead to the next 50 years. Accordingly, they invited a group of experienced TPRC participants to reflect on the question, what will be the role of TPRC for the next 50 years? The authors were given no further direction and encouraged to reach out on whatever aspect best fit with their own experience and expertise. The authors are, in alphabetical order:This diverse group collectively represents expertise and experience in policy, economics, regulation, government, international issues, and civil society. Each has provided his or her unique take on the question that was posed. Aspects of technology and law are interwoven with each of their areas, as are larger questions of the public interest and of the ethics and norms of the field. We hope you enjoy their takes on the next 50 years of TPRC.Thank you for being a JIP reader, and please consider us as you prepare to submit your next article for publication.Sincerely, the JIP Co-Editors,Krishna Jayakar, Penn State UniversityAmit Schejter, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Oranim College, Visiting Prof. Penn State UniversityRichard Taylor, Penn State University EmeritusThis is an ambitious topic and a challenge to reflect on, and many questions surface immediately. Will there be a TPRC still standing? What will be the main research agendas? How will the community around TPRC look like? How will the policy arena look like where TPRC aims to contribute? Certainly, more questions can be asked, and I will just touch on a few issues.As a starting point, I assume that TPRC will still be alive and kicking in 50 years. There are many societies and conference series that had successful and important developments but somehow got lost and dissolved—what happened, for instance, with World Future Society (WFS), International Council for Computer Communications (ICCC), European Communication Policy Research Conference (Euro-CPR), Conference on Telecommunication and Techno-Economics (CTTE), and International Conference on Mobile Business (ICMB) to name a few? All of these had a stream of successful conferences, but they are not convened any more. Certainly, it is easy to overestimate the likelihood of long-term survival when all is going well, but just a few financial shocks to an otherwise healthy nonprofit society can put an end to the whole series of events. Let us hope that the TPRC management can weather future financial storms and peril and survive, as has been done for the last 50 years!Moving on to research agendas, what will fill our minds in 50 years? As another starting point, it seems a safe bet that innovation in the broad group of information and communication technologies (ICT) will still be around. Despite many worries that the famous Moore’s Law will be attenuated and be less important, this law is still making impacts. Moreover, the broad field of ICT is growing as well through quantum, nano, and artificial intelligence grows to prominence. It seems a safe bet that confluence, convergence, combinations, and diversification between several subtechnologies within the ICT field will generate many important innovations to come. It seems a safe assumption that the ICT field will be an active source of dynamism, change, and relevance for the next 50 years.Having passed the threshold whether ICT in its broad terms will still be around in 50 years, the next question is what will be the main issues of concern, and main focal points? Among all the potential research issues that has been traditionally covered by the TPRC community, what will be dominant ones and what will be driving forces to generate new and important findings, relevant for policy makers? Out of which research interests that have been part of the TPRC agenda, which ones will be primarily on our minds 50 years hence? Perhaps, some issues that are less frequent at TPRC will become central in 50 years, and some issues that are central now will be minor issues then?In my speculation of future research issues, I fall back on an earlier and fulfilling experience in future watching and foresight engagement. It feels safe to go back to some personal roots to address such a far-reaching and consequential perspective! For about 1.5 years (1998–1999), I had the pleasure to be Visiting Scientist at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), a branch of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC). The JRC was (and is) formally a Directorate General of the European Commission, and the only research arm of the large and multifaceted European Commission (EC). The JRC developed step by step, with one of its original research facilities in Ispra (Italy) being part of the earlier Euratom collaboration. The IPTS was established in Sevilla (Spain) after the World Expo 1992 and experienced a sprawling growth phase in the late 90s with a lot of young staff with high ambitions and energy.In that context, an ambitious project supported by EC’s Fourth Framework Research Program was brought to IPTS. The project was named Alliance for a Sustainable Information Society (ASIS) and had very ambitious goals. Primarily, the project sought to link the development of a sustainable society in interaction with the parallel development of an information society. To that end, research was explored on the causal links between sustainable development and information society to identify the mutual interdependence between sustainability and the information society. As a starting point, the information society held promises to influence societal development in a more sustainable fashion, where sustainability was conceived in its widest sense, encompassing environment, social dimension, economy, and even culture. The project identified as well countervailing forces within the information society, creating potential backlash, rebound, and boomerang effects. Achieving more sustainability simply by investing more in ICT did not seem feasible. In addition, the project pursued practical action in terms of an alliance of members, declarations, workshops, conferences, and a memorandum of understanding. The project drew inspiration from the writings of the Club of Rome that in the 1970s identified and elaborated on the limits to growth, from both simulations and engagement with society. The project was active between 1998 and 1999, and basic information of the project is still available on the web at the time of writing.1Moreover, the project embedded the concern of a sustainable information society in a global context, especially considering the then emerging new world order, replacing the cold war era with a new era to be defined. This new global context was of high interest for the project, and speculation was rife with how the EU would fare in relation to a possibly more unified global context based on a Pax Americana versus a more multipolar global context, where competing centers of influence were exercising control and influence. The project drew inspiration from writings in Foreign Affairs on what the future geopolitical landscape would look like, and tried to define a particular European Way that would deal with information society and sustainability in a comparative better way than competing geopolitical interests. (Remember though that this was in the 1998–1999 time frame, well before 9/11 and its global repercussions.)The reason why I fall back on this tripartite division of fundamental concerns is that since the late 1990s and onward today, I think there is a general agreement that sustainability has risen to be an absolutely vital and strategic agenda. Concurrently, the various aspects of the information society (or nowadays, the preferred term is perhaps digitalization) is also increasingly a vital issue. And likewise, concerns about the geopolitical landscape have not diminished but become a heightened concern over the last two decades.My expectation is simply that this tripartite relationship will become even more important over the next decades and become an integral part of the TPRC debates and concerns. There are needs for new tools and analyses for understanding the causal links between information society and sustainability. There is a need to put sustainability and information society concerns as part of a geopolitical agenda. Simply put, regions that will not address sustainability will suffer in the long term, and disregard for sustainability will not just be a negative externality to other regions, but will be detrimental to its own population and growth prospects. Sustainability, notably climate change, will infuse an increased need for dialogue and discussion on relationships between governments, economic interests, and conflict zones. The economic consequences of both sustainability and information society impacts will be increasingly important for prosperity and well-being. Research cannot leave these matters only to policy makers.However, there are several challenges to overcome for such a wide research agenda, and it may be of course that few articles are able to address this complex. Rather, it will be more precisely defined articles, and articles reaching out to intellectual domains that are not so often available presently at TPRC. The scope of discourse is though expected to be widened, as the challenges of climate change and geopolitical developments seems unlikely to abate or diminish. Rather, a prediction that climate change and geopolitics will increase in importance over the next 50 years seems a safe prediction!As an example of the challenges though with such a wide remit of articles is to reflect on what is going on in established journals that typically accept various TPRC articles currently. Speaking from my own experience, as the editor of the Journal of Telecommunications Policy, there have been several articles submitted that address the impact of ICT on energy, or sustainability more broadly. Typically, these articles suffer from very complex causal considerations and sometimes grand overestimations. However, there are relatively few reviewers that would respond to review articles that address the ICT versus sustainability complex. The reviewers are few because on the one hand, reviewers have often a kind of preference to review in journals where they share some familiarity and authorship, and on the other hand, there are relatively few reviewers that are able to bridge both fields, as authors. Without reviewers, there are few ways forward for an article in a double-blind journal. So, then the choice is to refer the authors to journals that have, for instance, a greater competency in one of the fields of sustainability, as applicable, such as energy fields. Note here that the impact of dependent variable in these articles usually are various aspects of sustainability, rather than issues centered on ICT. Journals that are deeply oriented on the sustainability issue as the main impact variable will generally have a wider set of reviewers that are able to deliver relevant reviews.With this, I have described above a simple lock-in problem for journals and also conference communities, that is, that the transition to new topics and new research interests is a long process because of the competence inertia. Simply put, there is a tendency to keep on what is being done already because reviewer communities and research have made an investment in a certain profile, and there are increasing returns to continue with the competence and networks already there.Moving forward, to change a discourse and research agenda within a community and conference organization, a concerted effort to promote new ideas, new initiatives, and new research is needed. And that is not so easy when such an organization has limited funds to promote new research directions, compared with the role of research agencies. That constraint being realized, I congratulate the TPRC community for broadening the research agenda and types of articles over the years! It is not only that the formal title of the conference has changed although the TPRC acronym has been stable, moving from Telecommunications Policy Research Conference to Research Conference on Communications, Information, and Internet Policy, as the formal name of the conference. The actual program of the conference has been broadened considerably, compared with my first visit at the TPRC in 1990.These increasing returns may change if there is a kind of shock to the system, which suggests that the competence developed is irrelevant and not useful. And with the external forces providing an increasing complex set of issues in terms of climate change and geopolitical changes, shocks are expected. To throw out just one facet, the current bet by Russia to change the world order may have a supporting driver in climate change, as the Russian inland may become more habitable and suitable for agriculture over time compared with more southern places such as China and USA. It is sometimes said that countries in the more northern regions and countries such as Canada, Russia, and the Nordic countries would have comparative net gains due to climate change, compared with the increasing climate suffering of more southern regions. But no region will go without suffering and dramatic change, only that some regions will be comparatively better off in overall impacts, and the upper northern regions seem to have some benefits.This brings me to final consideration of development of long-term research agendas, and that is innovation. Innovation has not typically been part of the traditional telecommunications policy discourse, as the fundamental models guiding various aspects of policy advice has been based on traditional or main-stream economics. As is well known, this kind of economics is not primarily interested in innovation but rather the allocation of limited resources in some static or stable context. Infusing innovation in that context will impart unclear conditions and constraints and will contribute toward unstable or nonexisting equilibriums. Of course, there are a lot of articles on various aspects that cover economics of innovation in its own field, but this discourse has not altered the telecommunications policy discourse much. There are few active authors in the current regular TPRC community that consistently tries to bridge innovation economics with various telecommunications policy concerns, but they are a relatively small minority.It has sometimes been said that the first US dollar trillionaire will come from someone who can innovate and provide some workable solutions to the climate change challenge. There will be a considerable willingness to pay for innovation that in some way on a massive scale can deal with climate change, and such innovations promise as well to have geopolitical consequences. If the United States would become a leader to combat sustainability challenges and, in particular, climate change based on innovations in technologies and services, this will serve to provide additional geopolitical strength. The relationship is not simple though. Major innovations on for instance efficient carbon storage have an interesting free-ride problem as well, between those who deploy and harvest the innovation and those regions that get benefit from the innovation because of spillover effects. Regardless of complications, it seems safe to bet that ICT in its broad terms would be involved as well for such climate change combating innovations. But time is desperately short to overcome the climate change challenge, and solutions are few in coming.The TPRC community could perhaps become an additional vehicle where the earlier tripartite problem complex is discussed together with the innovation dimension. Perhaps, this is a wishful thinking, but it seems that new and relevant policy discourses can be formulated that bridge not only the three earlier dimensions but that innovation theories and innovation studies can further support and define a promising research agenda. TPRC could contribute to an important policy discourse for this interaction, supported by research. This would be my wish for TPRC over the next 50 years!This invitation to consider the role of TPRC for the next 50 years inevitably prompted reflection on my experiences as an attendee and participant in the conference over the past 20 or so years. I think it’s important to emphasize that my attendance and participation has been somewhat sporadic during this time, so my perspective is not one of a true TPRC insider (though I did spend a few years on the program committee way back when). My resulting lack of institutional knowledge may mean that the perspective I bring to this topic is a bit more superficial, a bit more out-sider-looking-in, than is likely to be the case for many of the other contributions to this special issue. With that disclaimer out of the way, one thing I can say with certainty is that when I look back at my experiences at TPRC, I realize that some of these experiences are difficult, if not impossible, to replicate at any of the other conferences that I attend regularly as a communications policy scholar. So, I’ll begin with some personal reflections.I recall completing my article presentation one year, and being approached after the panel by a senior Federal Communications Commission (FCC) attorney. He told me that he had enjoyed the article (he had even read it in advance; who does that anymore?) and that he was hoping that we could talk about it in greater depth. We found ourselves in a quiet corner in the George Mason University Law School, and he pulled out a hard copy of my article on which he had written extensive notes in the margins on virtually every page. I had never received such thoughtful, thorough, and useful feedback on a conference article before (and never have since)—and all from the invaluable perspective of an FCC staffer with years of experience in the trenches of communications regulation and policy. And, hopefully, there was at least something within that article that proved useful to him in his own work.Another year, I remember an article I presented prompting a respectful and incredibly thought-provoking post-panel argument between a senior FCC economist and the CEO of a public interest organization. I learned more listening in on that one argument than I typically do from the entirety of most other conferences that I attend.Another time, I was presenting an article that revisited a fairly old and undeniably very obscure piece of failed congressional legislation, only to find that one of the then-congressional staffers who had helped draft the legislation 15 years earlier happened to be sitting in the audience. He shared with me personal recollections that greatly improved the article. He was clearly a bit bemused that someone had thought it worthwhile to take a deep dive into this obscure corner of communications policy history. I like to think that I managed to convince him that his work back then had plenty of contemporary relevance.Reflecting on these valuable experiences from my somewhat sporadic attendance at TPRC over the past 20 years has helped to clarify my thinking a bit about the topic at hand—the role of TPRC over the next 50 years. As my recollections indicate, TPRC has distinguished itself as a rare venue in which academics and policy professionals come together, on equal footing, to think about the future of communications, information, and Internet policy. It is an environment in which there is a shared appreciation for research-driven approaches to tackling policy problems; and where academic researchers can find themselves in conversation with those who directly make policy change happen. In the course that I teach in Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy on Political Analysis of Public Policymaking, we spend a fair bit of time talking about knowledge brokers (individuals/organizations who connect producers and users of knowledge/research)2; and I always hold up the organizers of TPRC as a prime example of effective and impactful knowledge brokers. These kinds of opportunities remain a rarity for scholars. We have an entire program at my school called the Policy Bridge that is designed to address this problem.How can this knowledge brokerage be best leveraged going forward over the next 50 years? Answering this question requires taking a hard look not only at the state of communications, information, and Internet policy, but also at the broader political and cultural contexts in which these policies are deliberated, made, and evaluated (yes, I clearly can’t help approaching this subject like it’s a topic for my Political Analysis of Public Policymaking course).Obviously, we enter the next 50 years of communications, information, and Internet policymaking in a very different place politically than we have witnessed at any time during the previous 50 years.3 As I write this (June, 2022), I am taking frequent breaks to watch congressional testimony detailing efforts by an outgoing president to overthrow the government. And miraculously, this same outgoing president remains, at this point, a front-runner for the next presidential election.The times have certainly changed. Evidence, facts, research, and data all seem to matter a fair bit less to certain segments of the population (and policymakers) than they have in any time in recent history. Consequently, we obviously need to be realistic (probably even pessimistic) about the role that a conference like TPRC can play, and the impact that it can have, in such an environment. Indeed, we may need to be more modest in our ambitions and simply ask if/how TPRC can maintain what it has been over the past 50 years, rather than expect it to be able to do anything more. I recognize that I’m asking more questions than I’m answering. I’m unfortunately going to continue to do this.It’s impossible to consider the policy environment in which TPRC operates without considering the pronounced polarization and increased political extremism that has come to characterize the US politics and policymaking.4 This is a topic that has been chronicled and analyzed ad infinitum and so does not require further elaboration here.5 In considering the next 50 years of TPRC, the obvious question is: Can the conference stand above this political polarization and instead help nudge the pendulum in the other direction, and be a force for the depolarization—and depoliticization—of communications, information, and Internet policymaking? This may be too much to ask of a research conference, even one that has effectively served as many diverse constituencies (along ideological, disciplinary, and professional/occupational lines) as TPRC.But at the very least it would seem essential that TPRC be able to resist becoming a venue for perpetuating this problem (itself no easy task, as knowledge broker forums become contested territory).6 Here, the conference’s gatekeeping function becomes particularly important. We may need to ask of the conference organizers something similar to what we’re asking of journalists today—to resist traditional noncritical notions of “balance”; to avoid falling into “both side-ism”; and, most important, to be comfortable relying on one’s own independent expertise, analysis, and ethical compass to make determinations about whose work and whose viewpoints do/do not merit inclusion.An obvious by-product of this polarization and politicization is the continuing ossification of US communications, information, and Internet policymaking. Compared to so many other countries, very little has been accomplished in recent years on the policy front, even as the range of problems that would seem to merit some form of policy intervention (privacy, disinformation, information inequalities, news deserts, platform dominance, etc.) has increased.7 This stagnation of US communications, information, and Internet policymaking is particularly problematic given the extent to which many US media/telecom/tech sector companies/platforms are, to some degree, foundational to the global communications and information ecosystem. We’re essentially exporting our policy inaction to other countries for them to deal with. Even FCC commissioner positions sit vacant for stretches of time that are simply unconscionable—a further indication of how paralyzed the process has become.8Is there anything that rigorous policy research of the type showcased at TPRC can do to help jumpstart the process? Probably not, unfortunately. But policy change tends to be slow and incremental. Many of us who do policy research have, at some point over the past few years, probably had that stare-in-the-mirror moment when we’ve asked ourselves whether the kind of work that we do really matters anymore. Most of us, fortunately, have concluded that the answer is yes, if for no other reason than that the proliferation of knowledge vacuums could very well make things worse.9We’ve talked so far about how the political environment has changed in the 50 years since TPRC’s creation. Probably even more significant has been the degree of technological change. In his 1997 reflection on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of TPRC, Bruce Owen noted that continued interest in the conference was most likely a function of the “cataclysmic events that have shaken the communications industries since the 1970s.”10 It is safe to say that the events from the 1970s through the mid-1990s (when Owen was writing) have taken the notion of cataclysmic a whole different level. In 1997, we had yet to experience anything close to the full extent of the destabilizing, evolutionary, and (in some contexts) revolutionary effects of the diffusion of the Internet. The subsequent overlaying of social media platforms on top of the Internet was still roughly a decade from ramping up. Dial-up Internet access for exceeded broadband. Literally, thousands more newspapers existed than exist now. And, of course, mobile devices could do little more beyond traditional telephones in 1997 than offer a variety of ring tones.These technological changes have undermined traditional business models, facilitated new ones, created massive new repositories of data (sometimes accessible for research purposes, sometimes not; and sometimes used for far more troubling objectives), and, many would argue, have helped give rise to some of the political problems described earlier.11 This political environment in turn makes policy responses to these technological changes unlikely.12 So, essentially, we have a mutually reinforcing set of conditions.From a research standpoint, the end result of these technological changes is that the kinds of questions being asked at TPRC have changed (or at least expanded) dramatically. The kinds of data and methodological approaches that are being brought to bear have expanded as well. These changes have required an inclusiveness that has, fortunately, been a hallmark of the organizers of TPRC.On this front, TPRC must continue (perhaps even strengthen) its tradition of hospitability to a diversity of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.13 When we look at the history of communications, information, and Internet policy research, we can identify waves of disciplinary influx. So, for instance, a field dominated primarily by lawyers received an influx of economists beginning in the mid-1970s.14 Bruce Owen chronicles this process in his reflection on the origins of TPRC.15 As Owen recollects, the first TPRC featured presentations by 13 economists and two lawyers. Media and communications scholars become increasingly engaged with policy issues around the early 1990s and so found their way into the TPRC agenda as well.16 And then, most recently, we see the influx of computer and data scientists, reflecting the increasing intersection of the media, communications, and technology sectors as well as the increasing availability of troves of data that are inherent in the operation of contemporary digital media platforms.17 The “invisible college” that economist Stanley Besen attributed TPRC with creating has become increasingly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary.18 Given the scope, complexity, and impact of contemporary communications, information, and Internet policy, this multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are essential.Many of the researchers in the fields/disciplines represented at TPRC were likely told at some point in their education or their research career that their decision to focus their attention on communications/media/telecom policy was, to some degree, a decision to self-marginalize, to place oneself at the periphery of one’s home field or discipline. It was something I was told on a few occasions; and I know of political scientists, economists, and lawyers who were all, at some point told something similar. The past two decades have made clear how misguided this perspective has been; though the validation/vindication that has come with the increasing centrality of our digital communications ecosystem to all aspects of commerce, politics, and culture has been accompanied by the stakes associated with communications, information, and In