ABSTRACT
At the 1998 Society for Cinema Studies Annual Conference in San Diego, film historian Rick Altman presented what he called a “crisis historiography” model for explaining changes in film technology. (It later became a chapter in his book Silent Film Sound. [Altman, 2004]) Someone in the audience immediately popped up and asked why he called his theory a “crisis”model when it seemed to explain the typical development of the industry. “Because life,” Altman answered, “is perpetual crisis.” Altman may have explained why today we find ourselves in another crisis of internet policy, and why that crisis is not going to abate anytime soon. We live, it seems, in an age of perpetual internet policy crises. Contentious policy debates over antitrust, media ownership, network neutrality, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, censorship, privacy, the open internet, open access, retransmission fees, and spectrum management dominate newspaper headlines. It is now widely recognized that these once obscure policy issues will have a dramatic impact on the development of entertainment, news, and communication. In both the popular press and academic literature, we regularly read about how new policies will bring about the end of the internet as we know it or open up a new world just around the corner. The crisis rhetoric, as Altman suggests, may just be overstating the mundane fact that things change. But all signs suggest that internet policy, inherently contentious, will remain vitally important for the foreseeable future.
