The digital revolution has positively transformed our lives, but it has also created a number of new policy issues that individuals and their governments must address. For instance, faster and more efficient communication saves an enormous amount of time and money and increases our productivity and incomes, but it also creates new privacy and security issues. E-mail, which is now indispensable to business, dramatically facilitates communication but also creates spam. Downloading music is a wonderful convenience, but now musicians are having trouble getting paid for work that can be freely copied. These are some of the pressing issues that Sonia Arrison addresses in the columns found in this book. She also tackles problems that result when old policies don’t keep up with technological realities.

Telecommunications laws, for example, strangle growth in broadband deployment. Old, entrenched corporate and bureaucratic interests work against the rollout of online video services. City governments still attempt to push the private sector out of the WiFi market. And now a coalition of interventionists wants to experiment with price controls for Internet services.

In this collection of columns, Arrison addresses these issues head on and suggests practical solutions for a brighter future. Located near Silicon Valley, Arrison combines her knowledge of Silicon Valley’s digerati with sensible freemarket policies.