This may not be of interest to anyone but me, but on the theory that it’s better to post them all and let Google sort them out, here are the books I read for my forthcoming paper on network neutrality.
History of the Internet
Janet Abbate. Inventing the Internet. 1999. The best summary I found of the Internet’s formative years. The 1960s and 1970s are described carefully and in great detail. It gets a lot more general in the 1980s and 1990s.
James Gillies and Robert Cailliau. How the Web Was Born. 2000. A good book that focuses on Tim Berners-Lee and the developer of early web browsers
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. 1996. Similar to Abbate’s book, but with a somewhat broader focus. For example, it goes into some detail about the origins of USENET, which was originally not a part of the Internet.
Thomas P. Hughes. Rescuing Prometheus:Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World. 1998. The Internet is only one of the “monumental projects” and so this didn’t turn out to have much of the information I was looking for.
Ed Krol. The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog. O’Reilly and Associates, 1992. This is an interesting snapshot of the early Internet, but it turned out not to be relevant for my purposes.
Stephen Segaller. Nerds 2.0.1. 1998. Only skimmed this one
Railroad Regulation
Ari and Olive Hoogenboom. A History of the ICC: From Panacea to Palliative. 1976. A straight-forward account of the ICC’s origins and growth. The authors are way more sympathetic to the agency than I am.
Gabriel Kolko. Railroads and Regulation: 1877-1916. 1965. A classic. From what I’ve read, Kolko was a Marxist who intended this to be a treatise on why regulation was an insufficiently radical way to destroy capitalism, but the argument itself would make Milton Friedman proud.
Paul W. Macavoy. The Economic Effects of Regulation: The Trunk-Line Railroad Cartels and the Interstate Commerce Commission Before 1900. 1965. I only skimmed this one.
Telephone Regulation
John Brooks. Telephone: The First Hundred Years. 1975. A solid treatment that’s more sympathetic to the Bell System that I probably would be. Gives no hint of AT&T’s impending breakup
Steve Coll. The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T. 1986. Only skimmed this one
Peter Temin. The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices and Politics. 1987. A very detailed and insightful look at the economic and political forces that tore the Bell System apart.
Deregulation Generally
Martha Derthick and Paul J. Quirk. The Politics of Deregulation. 1985. This is an excellent overview of the intellectual and political forces that brought about the deregulation wave of the 1970s.
William J. Niskanen, Jr. Bureaucracy and Representative Government. 1971. The classic by Cato’s chairman
Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.
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