Law, Policy—and IT?

No other blog I have written for IHE has prompted me to think as deeply as the one the other...

Death by suicide is always disturbing, even if a decision after a well-lived life facing terminal, painful illness. When committed by a young, talented person with a seemingly invisible illness, it takes on even more pathos. Think of Sylvia Plath or Tyler Clementi or so many whose names do not evoke immediate recognition. In cases such as these, and in reflection now of Aaron Swartz, I cannot help but feel how sad it is because it should not have turned out that way.

“A year ago, I could not have imagined that we would be where we are now,” she said. “Who knows where we’ll be in five more years?” ask Ms. Koller, a representative of Coursera, the most utilized of the MOOC options so far.

In Commissioner Jon Leibowitz NYT quote is the salient point: “While not everything Google did was beneficial, on balance we did not believe that the evidence supported an F.T.C. challenge to this aspect of Google’s business under American law.” "Under American Law …"

1. Copyright Reform balancing innovation with incentive. 2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act reform updating legislation technologically while retaining Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

Most folks don't pay much attention to administrative law. It is not an area of law taught at any level of school except law; it is hardly mentioned in 7th grade civics, for example, too busy with the tripartite form of republican democracy. If you take American history as an undergraduate it shows up most prominently in a discussion of the New Deal and the alphabet soup of federal agencies that emerged with Roosevelt's social policy from the first 100 days through to the establishment of the Social Security Administration and National Labor Relations Board in the second administration. Its history began much earlier, however, with the Interstate Commerce Commission of 1887 formed to regulate railroads. In 1914, Congress passed the Federal Trade Commission Act, which was the statutory basis of the Federal Trade Commission.

The United States, which in the negotiation got just about everything that it wanted, refused to sign the agreement that speaks to global Internet governance. Why? Because the United States does not want to recognize any shared governance of that which it largely controls, namely, the root domain servers that assigns names and numbers on the Internet. ICANN is an arm of the Department of Commerce, which is the government agency still in charge of those servers. The very process of this treaty poses a challenge to the United State's singular control over the technical foundation of the Internet as it operates internationally today.

Dan Goldstein, attorney for National Federation of the Blind, has recently published the clearest articulation to date of the relationship between disability law and web accessibility. In short, while the Americans Disability Act, promulgated in 1990, did not explicitly speak to cyberspace, it nonetheless is the legal foundation upon which accommodations to it are required of those entities that fall under its scope, including higher education. This point is an important one to make. For some years, institutional attorneys and disability advocates have gotten tangled in discussions about whether section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which outlines a baseline of technical standards for web accessibility and is required for all federal agencies, is required of colleges and universities.