Providing a comprehensive and accessible introduction to today's U.S. information technology policy issues, this title identifies the main players, and describes the history of legislation and court cases, homeland security, online commerce, anti-trust, and more.
This book provides an introductory overview to all of the major policy issues in the United States related to information technology. These issues include federal funding of research that helped to create the Internet; telecommunications issues such as regulations about wireless technologies; computer security and homeland defense; governance and use of the Internet such as spam, viruses, electronic voting, taxation of online commerce, and child pornography; privacy; intellectual property issues such as copyright infringement related to peer-to-peer sharing of music and video files, or trademark infringement through the misuse of domain names (cybersquatting); antitrust in the software industry; uneven access to information technology in poor, rural, and minority communities (Digital Divide); and visas for foreign workers. Every chapter identifies the main players, the history of legislation and court cases in this area, and describes recent events. Accessible and interesting to both policy people and technical computing people, as well as to any computer user or IT worker who wanted a general understanding of these issues. The book will help policy people, most of whom are generalists, to understand the basic issues of IT policy. The book will also help IT professionals to understand the process by which their technology is politically controlled.