Communications and information policy

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Productive life is ever more difficult without access to advanced telecommunications networks, both wireless and wired, and the information and services available through the Internet. As networking technologies pervade our lives, they engage public policy concerns ever more directly. Good engineering design increasingly must anticipate both public policy tussles and business strategy imperatives. At the same time, technical innovations are reshaping the possibility space for implementing effective public policies across many domains, including public safety, consumer privacy, media diversity, and economic development.

This team-taught, multi-disciplinary elective course focuses on the interplay of technology, policy, economics, and business strategy in public telecommunications and Internet networks. The course aims to equip students with techniques useful for exploring the social and economic impacts of design decisions and, conversely, for designing engineering systems consistent with social and economic requirements. It provides an essential foundation for student research (thesis or otherwise) in this domain.

Students will work in teams on design challenges drawn from pressing debates at the frontiers of communications networking and information policy. Class lectures, discussions and readings will develop the background necessary to support knowledgeable exploration of selected design challenges, as well as provide overviews of additional topics of interest.

ESD.10 (Introduction to Technology and Policy), or permission of instructor. Students who have not taken ESD.10 are encouraged to familiarize themselves with Stone, Deborah. Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393976254.

Nuechterlein, J., and P. Weiser. Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. ISBN: 0262140918.

Evaluation will be based on following:

An overview of technical topics underpinning the course, including the Internet's architecture, application design, and wired and wireless networking technologies.

This section of the course will provide the necessary background to support the topics offered as design challenges. It is broken into four submodules:

While students are preparing their final projects, additional lecturers will be invited to address the class on additional topics of interest.

Classroom presentation and discussion of final projects.

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