The Persistence of the Dirigiste Model: Wireless Spectrum Allocation in Europe, à la Francaise.

This Note examines spectrum allocation for 3G mobile wireless networks in Europe in light of larger EC telecommunications and competition policies. The European Commission has allowed each member state to allocate spectrum to firms in two ways: (1) by the free market auction; and (2) by the beauty pageant method by which firms submit detailed proposals to the government, and government bureaucrats make the final selections. This Note focuses on France as the prime example of the beauty pageant method, and argues that, despite the excesses of the prices of spectrum on the free market auctions, the beauty pageant method has even more disturbing drawbacks

The Persistence of the Dirigiste Model: Wireless Spectrum Allocation in Europe, à la Francaise.

This Note examines spectrum allocation for 3G mobile wireless networks in Europe in light of larger EC telecommunications and competition policies. The European Commission has allowed each member state to allocate spectrum to firms in two ways: (1) by the free market auction; and (2) by the beauty pageant method by which firms submit detailed proposals to the government, and government bureaucrats make the final selections. This Note focuses on France as the prime example of the beauty pageant method, and argues that, despite the excesses of the prices of spectrum on the free market auctions, the beauty pageant method has even more disturbing drawbacks

Does French Matter? France and Francophonie in the Age of Globalization

THE ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE LA FRANCOPHONIE (OIF) increasingly acts as a powerful French-speaking voice in defense of both French culture and language and in advancing French-speaking nations\u27 multiple global, political and economic interests. While the OIF includes developed as well as developing1 nations, its policies and financial resources come from its wealthier and more economically powerful members, fueling charges that it exists to represent those members\u27 interests. The OIF is unique among international organizations in propounding economic policies based on assumptions different from those espoused by the World Trade Organization (WTO). These differences become most apparent in OIF\u27s strong stance supporting cultural exceptions in international trade. This article examines the claims pursued by the OIF, the issue of whose interests are being served, and prospects for its future

Electronic administration in Spain: from its beginnings to the present

This study presents the basic lines of electronic administration in Spain. The complexity of the Spanish political-administrative system makes such a study challenging, in view of the considerable degree of autonomy and competences of the regional administrative bodies and local agencies with respect to the central government, the former being more visible in the 17 regions of Spain. Nonetheless, the central government maintains a series of legal instruments that allow a certain common framework of action to be imposed, aside from what is put into effect through diverse programs aimed precisely to develop common tools for the regions and municipalities of Spain. After an introduction that provides some necessary background, this study describes the legislative framework in which Spain's electronic administrative system has developed. The data included in the study refer to investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the services offered by the different Administrations on the internet; internet access by citizens, homes, businesses, and employees, as well as the interactivity existing with administrations by means of the internet; the origins and rise of various political initiatives of the Central Government involving electronic administration; and finally, the situation of civil service personnel, as catalysts of the success of Information Society in the Public Administration within Spain

American Exceptionalism, The French Exception, Intellectual Property Law, and Peer-to-peer File Sharing on the Internet, 10 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 95 (2010)

A fundamental problem confronting policy makers is how to apply intellectual property rules and regulations developed for tangible intellectual property assets in real space to intangible,dematerialized intellectual property in cyberspace. The United States and France are self-described exceptionalist countries. American exceptionalism refers to the historical tendency of the United States to emphasize its unique status as the beacon of liberty, while l’exception française (the French exception) refers to the French ideological posture that emphasizes the specificity and superiority of French culture. American exceptionalism and l’exception française are functionally equivalent theoretical constructs that describe and explain how the United States and France highlight their respective political and cultural specificities vis-à-vis the rest of the world. The copyright regime of the United States reflects American exceptionalism, while the French régime de droit d’auteur(author’s right regime) reflects the French exception. The purpose of this article was to study the exceptional intellectual property regimes of the United States and France, using as a comparative case study application of intellectual property laws designed for the offline environment, to online peer-to-peer file sharing on the Internet. A comparative analysis of statutory and case law in the United States and France demonstrates that: 1) The American intellectual property regime has a presumption against the legality of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that exchange copyrighted material without permission, and 2) the French intellectual property regime classifies peer-to-peer file-sharing on the Internet as piracy, a criminal offense. The American intellectual property regime often grants copyright holders the power to violate the due process and privacy rights of citizens accused of copyright infringement, while the French system allows law enforcement officials and royalty collection societies to violate the “presumption of innocence” and privacy rights of accused peer-to-peer file-sharers.\u2

Voicing the Web: The Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France

The World Wide Web has turned into an important means to share voice, that is, the narratives through which individuals give a public account of their lives. This dissertation analyzes how this key cultural process came into being and discusses some of its main implications. To this end, it studies one specific technology of subjectivity that embodies this process in fundamental ways: the blog. This dissertation examines the processes that have shaped practices of subjectivity on the Web in two countries (the United States and France) from the mid-1990s to the early years of the 2010s. The focus is on three processes: the emergence of the blog; its constitution into a means for intervening in the public sphere and a commodity; and the identity crises triggered by the rise of novel media technologies (such as “microblogging”) designed to replace or extend it. A theoretical framework is developed that makes four analytic contributions: (a) it considers media technologies as assemblages of both textual meaning and material artifacts; (b) it analyzes both the production and use of media technologies; (c) it adopts a process-orientation to make sense of the temporal development of the Web; and (d) it implements a comparative approach to identify the similarities and differences between the cases under study. Drawing on interviews with key actors, content and artifact analyses of websites, traditional archival research, and online archival research, this dissertation examines how users and software developers have enacted particular notions of the self, conceived the publicness of their Web appropriation and development practices, and built and utilized media technologies such as websites and software programs to these ends. The analysis reveals that the cultural identity of blogging as a practice of subjectivity in these two countries is neither inevitable nor neutral. In the United States, particular liberal notions and neoliberal assumptions have informed the imaginary surrounding blogs in crucial ways. The study also shows how and why actors in France have gradually abandoned traditional makers of exceptionalism that were key in the development of the country’s national identity and favored notions that characterize the United States instead.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM