Susan Crawford Captive Audience Paper

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?