Free speech and the challenge of efficiency

Radical transformation has come to speech platforms in the Information Society 2.0, typified by the migration from newspapers to social media. The change has been spurred by disruptive efficiencies in digital platforms. First, information distribution has been altered by near-costless electronic reproduction. Second, traditional bundles -- packaging editorial content of publications or broadcast networks with general-interest advertising messages -- have been eclipsed by competitively superior news aggregation hubs. Third, specialized content, including advertising, has become more easily targeted and better supplied via “long tails.” Fourth, the democratization of “publishing” has transformed “editing” into “platform mediation.” The resulting changes in market organization have made vastly higher volumes of news and public affairs information – from exponentially more sources – easily available to mass market consumers. In so doing, they have rendered the “Walter Cronkite” consensus obsolete, creating social controversy and considerable backlash. Demands to regulate, or re-regulate, are frequently voiced across the political spectrum. Such policies as “public interest” licensing, public utility regulation, and the Fairness Doctrine are here evaluated.     

Convergence and regulation of multi-screen television: The Singapore experience

This article addresses complicated convergent and regulatory issues arising from cross-platform audiovisual services and analyzes Singapore's multi-screen television experience. A “platform neutrality” multi-screen TV regulatory scheme is proposed to concentrate on content classification in order to respond to the fast-changing audiovisual industry and competition. Under the scheme, different content and license regulations are applied to four types of TV-like services which are categorized by “socio-cultural impact” (i.e., broadcasting and mass market vs. VOD and niche market)” and “content production/aggregation model” (i.e., gatekeeping vs. participatory mechanism). In addition, competition, content regulation, and digital copyright are identified as key issues involved in the fast-growing cross-platform audiovisual media industry. Finally, this study analyzes market development, regulatory issues, and national plans for multi-screen TV services in Singapore and examines them under the proposed regulatory scheme. Market and policy recommendations are discussed.     

语音情感识别专利分析

为了深入了解语音情感识别领域的技术发展状况,采取定量与定性交叉融合的分析方式,对当今语音情感识别领域相关专利的申请态势、技术发展脉络、申请国别、主要申请人等进行了多角度的分析和探讨。结果表明,在语音情感识别技术的发展进程中,中国虽然起步较晚,但发展速度很快,已逐渐赶超美、日、韩等发达国家;中国大部分专利还处于科研阶段,距大规模商业化尚有一定距离。另外,中国语音情感识别领域还有很多技术空白点,亟待专利布局,因此,中国的科研院校与企业应积极合作,发挥各自优势,以市场为导向,提高语音情感识别技术的市场竞争力。同时,要进一步加大对语音情感识别技术基础要件的科研力度,并勇于探索更尖端的技术领域。研究结果不仅可作为语音情感识别领域科研人员确定研究方向的依据,还可为政府和企业的规划决策提供参考。     

App store governance: Implications,limitations, and regulatory responses

Events such as the riot at the United States Capitol and tightening constraints on the Russian public sphere have highlighted the socio-political significance of app store governance. This is dominated by Apple and Google as operators of the two largest smartphone platforms. In this article, we analyse two case studies: the removals from app stores in 2021 of the fringe American social media app Parler and of the Russian opposition app Smart Voting. On the basis of this analysis, we identify three critical limitations for app store governance at present: Apple's and Google's dominance, the substantive opacity of their respective app store guidelines, and the arbitrariness with which these guidelines are applied to specific cases. We then assess the potential efficacy of legislative proposals in the EU and US to intervene in this domain and conclude by offering some recommendations supporting more efficacious and socially responsible app store governance.     

A comparison of selected Western and Chinese smart governance: The application of ICT in governmental management,participation and collaboration

There has been increasing scholarly interest in the concepts and practices of smart governance. However, there is a lack of comparative studies of smart governance in different institutional contexts. This study develops a framework for comparing smart governance in different institutional and technological contexts. Comparative and discourse analyses are conducted to understand the similarities and differences of smart governance practices in selected Western countries and China. A key finding of this study is that different institutions have largely affected smart governance strategies, arrangements and outcomes. Smart governance is tightly linked with e-governance and e-democracy in some Western countries, while it officially emphasizes smart management and service in China. A common aspect is that the increasing use of social media, smartphones, portals, crowdsourcing platforms, and planning support systems have generally promoted smart governments and services, e-participation, and wider collaboration through both top-down and bottom-up approaches. This could lead to gradual changes in government organizations, new relations between governments, the private sector and citizens, and improvements in the city.     

Governance and social media in African countries: An empirical investigation

This study assesses linkages between social media and governance dynamics in 49 African countries for the year 2012. The empirical evidence is based on ordinary least squares and quantile regressions. Ten bundled and unbundled governance dynamics are used, notably: (i) political governance (entailing “voice & accountability” and political stability/no violence); (ii) economic governance (involving regulation quality and government effectiveness); (iii) institutional governance (comprising the rule of law and corruption-control) and (iv) general governance (entailing political, economic and institutional governance). Social media is measured with Facebook penetration. The findings show that Facebook penetration is positively associated with governance dynamics and these positive nexuses differ in terms of significance and magnitude of significance throughout the conditional distribution of the governance dynamics.     

Regulatory governance in African telecommunications: Testing the resource curse hypothesis

This paper examines regulatory governance in the context of African telecommunications. Though there is already a substantial literature devoted to the regulatory practices in developing countries, it generally conceptualizes the quality of regulation as an exogenous policy variable that affects the performance of the telecommunications sector or treats it as a normative recommendation to improve performance.     

User Involvement throughout the Innovation Process in High‐Tech Industries

The feedback and input of users have been an important part of product innovation in recent years. User input has been studied from different approaches and is applied through different methods in particular phases of the innovation process. However, these methods are not integrated into the whole innovation process and are used only in particular phases or on an ad hoc basis. New developments in technology, social media, and new ways of working closer with customers have opened up new possibilities for firms to gain user input throughout the whole innovation process. However, the impact that these new developments in technology offer for user input innovation in high‐tech firms is unclear. Therefore, we study how high‐tech firms collect and apply user feedback throughout the whole innovation process. The paper is based on a comparative case study of eight cases in the high‐tech industry, in which qualitative data collection was applied. The key contribution of the paper is a conceptual framework on user data‐driven innovation throughout the innovation cycle. This framework gives insight into user involvement types and approaches to collect and apply user feedback throughout the innovation process.     

Accounting for ARPU: New evidence from international panel data

Average revenue per user (ARPU) is commonly used by regulators and industry observers to compare the performance of mobile telephony markets. Under the new EU electronic communications regulatory framework, some national regulatory authorities (NRAs) have linked higher ARPU with ‘significant market power’. This paper empirically examines the determinants of ARPU in a systematic way, taking account of service quality, market environment, regulation and quantity of service. The robust results suggest that concentration may not be a reliable indicator of competition in mobile markets; there are economies of density in mobile markets; and higher GDP per capita increases ARPU.     

Social media marketing of IT service companies: Analysis using a concept-linking mining approach

The IT service industry values the experience of social familiarity, which is based on routine interactions with suppliers and customers and is at the frontier of social media marketing. To further understand how IT service companies use social media to engage their customers or potential leads, the objectives of this research are to delineate the differences between IT service companies’ use of social media and users’ expectations based on knowledge extracted from user-generated content on Twitter. We applied a text mining approach called two-tier concept-linking analysis to extract patterns in Twitter posts from top IT service companies as well as the related tweets from the Twitter users. We further compare the yearly similarities and differences of the key concepts from the company’s official account and from the users. Besides, the key concepts between users’ expectations and IT service companies’ social media use were compared on the basis of first-tier concepts and further elaborated by their corresponding second-tier concepts. Our approach contributes to further understand the socio-cognitive insights underlying the dynamic social media data, from which organizations and individuals in charge can note the objectives they wish to maintain and the marketing gaps they wish to improve on.     

Disclaiming responsibility: How platforms deadlocked the Federal Election Commission's efforts to regulate digital political advertising

Digital advertisements used to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election lacked disclaimers stating who paid for them. This was deliberate on the part of the platforms: Facebook and Google actively sought exemptions from mandatory disclaimer requirements that are standard for print and broadcast media. While prior research has placed blame squarely on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for their lack of oversight of digital advertising, this paper demonstrates the way in which the platforms–Facebook in particular–engineered this regulatory failure in the form of capture on this specific issue. An analysis of documents submitted to the FEC demonstrates that Facebook and Google put profit ahead of the public interest in seeking exemptions from disclaimer requirements, refusing to change the size of their advertisements and downplaying the deceptive potential of political ads. Due to partisan gridlock and a lack of technological expertise, the FEC failed to rule decisively on exemptions or agree on alternative means of disclaimers for Facebook and mobile app ads, setting the stage for electoral interference in 2016. Implications for current regulatory efforts are discussed.     

Power plays: Regulation,diversification, and backward integration in the electric utility industry

This paper explores how regulatory oversight influences strategic management. Predictions of the extent to which a firm diversifies and integrates upstream based on transaction-cost economics are developed and then tested among 49 American electric utilities from 1974 through 1986, a period that witnessed increasingly hostile regulatory relations. The results confirm the influence of regulation on both diversification and backward integration, supporting the transaction-cost view of these phenomena. The implications of these findings for the study of interorganizational relations, the concept of implicit contracting as a governance mechanism, and the pursuit of longitudinal theory-building are discussed.     

Universal service issues in converging communications environments: the case of the UK

Convergent trends in telecommunications and broadcasting technologies and markets have called forth a re-examination of universal service provision in the communications sector and present an opportunity to update and re-formulate its provision. In the UK, proposed changes announced in the 2000 UK Communications White Paper and subsequent 2003 Communications Act, whilst still emphasising the importance of guaranteeing universal access to stipulated key public services and content across communications, suggest a closer relationship between economic and content regulation will be developed. This paper argues that whilst it is important to consider issues of economic efficiency in the communications sector, this should neither obscure nor compromise the need to create progressive, socially responsible, universal service reflective of the requirements of 21st century users. Crucial to the delivery of such a system in the UK is an actively supportive government policy backdrop and the development of the new convergent regulator the Office of Communications as an effective regulatory force.     

Access regulation and geographic deployment of a new generation infrastructure

This paper addresses the impact of regulatory policy on levels of infrastructure deployment and derived welfare in the telecommunications sector. The model considers two potentially coexisting and partially competing technologies (the “old generation network” – OGN – and the “new” generation network – NGN). This framework allows us to show that the “regulation defining access charge in order to maximize infrastructure deployment” is strictly equivalent to the case in which “no regulation applies”. We also derive from the model that these two types of regulation induce higher social welfare, but lower numbers of NGN consumers, compared to the “ex post access prices” regulation. Finally, we show that the level of infrastructure deployment (as well as social welfare and number of NGN consumers) will be highest if both investment and access charge decisions are taken by the welfare maximizing regulator. This suggests that the social optimum will be achieved through a calls-for-tender process that includes deployment and access charge requirements.     

Spectrum sharing in the gray space

There has been considerable effort to let more wireless devices operate in white space spectrum, that is within frequency bands and geographic areas where no wireless devices are active. Making white space available is certainly useful, but there are other sharing opportunities as well, some of which have been obscured by dangerous misconceptions about the concept of unused spectrum. This paper discusses allowing more devices to operate safely in gray space spectrum, that is spectrum that is actively being used in that transmissions are underway—something many economic models assume is impossible. The paper focuses on primary–secondary sharing, so devices gaining access to spectrum operate on a secondary basis in a way that never causes harmful interference to primary systems. Examples of primary–secondary gray space sharing mechanisms are described in which devices are allowed to share spectrum with broadcasting, radar, and cellular systems. Quantitative analysis shows that it is technically possible to support significant communications among secondary devices in spectrum that is already heavily used by cellular or radar. However, gray space sharing generally causes primary and secondary systems to be more technically interdependent than white space sharing, so different policy and governance structures are needed. Secondary market rules can support gray space sharing in cases where there is a single primary spectrum user, such as a cellular carrier. In cases where technology is static, the regulator may be able to control access for secondary devices. However, in cases with multiple primary users and multiple secondary users of spectrum, as might be seen in bands with radar for example, a new kind of governance body will be needed to facilitate spectrum sharing.     

创新:企业社会保险工作者的责任

企业年金在中国是个新生事物。目前作为特大型企业集团国家电网公司,正在国家企业年金制度的框架和有关部门的监管下,按照市场化运营和管理的要求,进行企业年金规范管理试点的实践。国家电网公司社会保险事业管理中心依靠自主创新,进行业务数据大集中工程,打造数字化企业年金,推动信息化建设,为公司系统的企业和职工提供企业年金业务数据不丢、业务不断的专业化服务,突显公司系统社保工作人员的责任。     

Extending Lead‐User Theory: Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Lead Userness*

Lead users are found to come up with commercially attractive user innovations and have been shown to be a highly promising source of innovation for new product development tasks. According to lead‐user theory, these users are defined as being ahead of an important market trend and experiencing high benefits from innovating. The present article extends lead‐user theory by exploring the antecedents and consequences of consumers' lead userness in the course of three studies on extreme sports communities. Regarding antecedents, it uncovers that field‐related variables (consumer knowledge and use experience) as well as field‐independent personality variables (locus of control and innovativeness) help explain an individual's lead userness. These variables might therefore be used as a proxy to identify the rare species of lead users. With regard to consequences, it uncovers that lead users demonstrate innovative behavior not only by creating new product ideas but also by adopting new commercial products more heavily and faster than ordinary users. This highlights the idea that lead users might not only be valuable to idea‐generation processes for radically new concepts; instead, they might also be relevant to more general issues in the marketing of new products.     

政府监制与电力监管

阐述了政府管制的内涵及研究视角,论述了电力监管作为政府管制的重要组成部分的组成要素、基本任务、主要内容和监管体系。     

Information and two-sided platform profits

We study the effect of different levels of information on two-sided platform profits—under monopoly and competition. One side (developers) is always informed about all prices and therefore forms responsive expectations. In contrast, we allow the other side (users) to be uninformed about prices charged to developers and to hold passive expectations. We show that platforms with more market power (monopoly) prefer facing more informed users. In contrast, platforms with less market power (i.e., facing more intense competition) have the opposite preference: they derive higher profits when users are less informed. The main reason is that price information leads user expectations to be more responsive and therefore amplifies the effect of price reductions. Platforms with more market power benefit because higher responsiveness leads to demand increases, which they are able to capture fully. Competing platforms are affected negatively because more information intensifies price competition.     

Expertise and Participation in the Facebook Oversight Board: From Reason to Will

This paper explores two strategies that the Facebook Oversight Board has available to build its own legitimacy. It argues that the Board's members perform as apolitical decision-makers. With that goal, the Board has portrayed international human rights law as a set of exogenous and universal principles that human rights experts can translate and implement on social media. The paper suggests that, instead of hiding its power behind alleged translations of higher principles, the Board could try to build its legitimacy by promoting the wider involvement of civil society. The Board could wield its power to strengthen civil society's participation in Facebook's drafting of content moderation rules. The Board could then present itself as a legitimate body not because it applies international law but because it encourages the participation of more actors and defers to their judgment. Despite the many limitations of this proposal, it would include more actors in the governance of online speech instead of shielding experts from participatory politics.