Susan Crawford Captive Audience The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age

As part of the course requirements, you are to write a review of the following book: Susan Crawford. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, 368 pages. ISBN: 978030015312.

The book review should be a minimum of 6 pages and is to be typed (double spaced) and checked for proper grammar and spelling. Here are some general instructions:

• The introductory segment should describe the subject matter of the book. What are the issues under examination in this book? What is the author trying to accomplish?

• The review should present a coherent and succinct summary of the author’s main arguments.

• Be sure to explain the principle of “common carriage” and the historical importance of common carriage obligations in transportation, local telephone, and utility services. Should society impose common carriage obligations on monopolistic suppliers of broadband data services? Why or why not? Summarize Crawford’s view on this question.

• A key issue concerns the upstream vertical integration of broadband cable distribution giants like Comcast into programming or content development. Is what sense was the Comcast-NBC Universal merger a vertical merger? How is this merger anti-competitive, in Crawford’s view?

• After reading Crawford’s book, do you have any views on the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner (Time Warner is currently the nation’s number 2 supplier of high speed cable services, and also a large cable content provider)? • The final segment of the review should summarize your overall impression of the book. Do you think this is an important book? Has your thinking changed after reading this book? Would you recommend this book to others?

PLAGIARISM Plagiarism is the act of taking and/or using the ideas, work, and/or writings of another person as one’s own. 2 1. To avoid plagiarism give written credit and acknowledgment to the source of thoughts, ideas, and/or words, whether you have used direct quotation, paraphrasing, or just a reference to a general idea. 2. If you directly quote works written by someone else, enclose the quotation with quotation marks and provide an appropriate citation (e.g., footnote, endnote, bibliographical reference). 3. Research, as well as the complete written paper, must be the work of the person seeking academic credit for the course. (Papers, book reports, projects, and/or other class assignments). Note that I have bolded point (2) above. It is fine to take direct quotes from the author(s) in your book review. However, you must enclose the quote in quotation marks and follow with the page number in parenthesis. For example: Crawford notes that “Netflix is engaged in a game of chicken with Comcast”(p. 181)

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