Dr. Mark 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 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. He is the author of two books - The Transformation of Egypt (Johns Hopkins, 1982) and Equity and Energy (Westview, 1983).
Current Projects
Communications and Media Markets in Digital Society examines the impact of digital technologies on American society. It broadens the concept of modalities of regulation (architecture, law, markets, and norms) to identify four realms of social order (technology, economy, polity, civic institutions) and applies this framework to describe and evaluate the structure of ownership, conduct of producers and consumers, and the performance of media markets. The emphasis is on understanding the importance of open communications platforms - as embodied in the end-to-end principle of the Internet - to dynamic innovation in the economy and enriched civic discourse in the polity. The ultimate goal is to define a regime of "Internet-carriage" that preserves the principle of nondiscriminatory interconnection, which has been the cornerstone of communications and transportation networks throughout American history, in a flexible framework for the 21st century.
Collaborative Information Production and Cooperative Institutions solve economic problems in unique, non-market ways. Collaborative, peer-to-peer information production has emerged on the Internet (e.g., open source, free software). Cooperative organizations have long been part of the American landscape (e.g., farmers cooperatives, credit unions). This project considers two areas in which cooperative forms of organization may further information collaboratives in the Internet-age. First, producer cooperatives may be a vehicle to provide organizational stability and permanence to peer-to-peer production. Second, consumer information cooperatives may help to expand the scope of collaborative production beyond the technologically sophisticated community that currently participates in peer-to-peer production to a broader segment of the public.