Mark Cooper 3/3

Dr. Mark Cooper will discuss threats to the dynamically innovative Internet posed by the anticompetitive practices of advanced telecommunications network owners. Cooper’s new book, CABLE MERGERS AND MONOPOLIES: MARKET POWER IN DIGITAL MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS, combines “new economy” concepts of communications platforms with traditional industrial organization concepts. He argues that two forms of market power ignored by antitrust practice in the latter part of the 20th century – vertical leverage and monopsony (buyer market power) – are critical challenges to open communications in the digital information age. Refusal to interconnect and withholding of network functionalities directly contribute to the disappointing market performance of the high-speed Internet. These should be seen as violations of antitrust and communications law and remedied by public policy.Monday, March 3, 2003
12:30-1:30 pm
Moot Court Room
Stanford University Law School
Lunch will be provided
All Welcome

Speaker's Biography:

Dr. Cooper holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and is a former Yale University and Fulbright Fellow. He is Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America where he has responsibility for energy, telecommunications, and economic policy analysis. He is also Director of the Digital Society Project, a Ford Foundation funded effort to analyze and explain the impact of ongoing technological changes in American society to consumer, low income, and civil rights activists and organizations.

During 2002-2003, Dr. Cooper is a Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society and an Associated Fellow at the Columbia University Institute on Tele-Information.

He has published numerous articles in trade and scholarly journals including recent law review articles on digital society issues (“Open Communications Platforms: Cornerstone Of Innovation And Democratic Discourse In The Internet Age, The Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, forthcoming; “Inequality in Digital Society,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, 2002; “The Digital Divide Confronts the Telecommunications Act of 1996: Econmic Reality versus Public Policy,” in B.M. Compaine (Ed.). The Digital Divide Cambridge: MIT); “Antitrust as Consumer Protection in the New Economy: Lessons From the Microsoft Case,” Hasting Law Journal, April 2001; and “Open Access to the Broadband Internet,” University of Colorado Law Review, Fall 2000). He is the author of two books – The Transformation of Egypt (Johns Hopkins, 1982) and Equity and Energy (Westview, 1983), Cable Mergers and Monopolies: Market Power in Digital Media and Communications Networks (Economic Policy Institute 2003).

He has provided expert testimony in over 250 cases for public interest clients including Attorneys General, People’s Counsels, and citizen interveners before state and federal agencies, courts and legislators in almost four dozen jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada.