Traditionally, the technologies of telecommunications, broadcasting, satellite, and computing operated independently while the industries associated with each were regulated independently along the same lines. Technological convergence challenges the vertical regulatory models of broadcasting, telecommunications, and computer services while simultaneously challenging the traditional approach to regulation by nation-states. It is time for a critical examination of regulations which support convergence while addressing the realities of the current media environment. This edited volume provides a heuristic analysis of the challenges facing regulators and media institutions. Chapters explore the nature of the laws and regulations straining under the new technological realities, consider the changes already made to accommodate the new media landscape, and examine new directions and approaches to the regulation of convergent media technologies and media institutions.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.International banking standards are intended for the regulation of large, complex, risk-taking international banks with trillions of dollars in assets and operations across the globe. Yet they are being implemented in countries with nascent financial markets and small banks that have yet to ventureinto international markets. Why is this? This book develops a new framework to explain regulatory interdependence between countries in the core and the periphery of the global financial system. Drawing on in-depth analysis of eleven countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it shows howfinancial globalisation generates strong reputational and competitive incentives for developing countries to converge on international standards. It explains how specific cross-border relations between regulators, politicians, and banks within developing countries, and international actors includinginvestors, peer regulators, and international financial institutions, generate regulatory interdependence. It explains why some configurations of domestic politics and forms of integration into global finance generate convergence with international standards, while other configurations lead todivergence. This book contributes to our understanding of the ways in which governments and firms in the core of global finance powerfully shape regulatory decisions in the periphery, and the ways that governments and firms from peripheral developing countries manoeuvre within the constraints andopportunities created by financial globalisation.

“What the future fortunes of [Gramsci’s] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this.” —Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci’s masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary. Gramscian terms such as “civil society” and “hegemony” are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci’s purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci’s writings, is absorb Gramsci’s methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of “grand explanatory schemes,” the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: “Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society.” The rigor of Santucci’s examination of Gramsci’s life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.

Offers a new approach to the legal issues raised by the drive for convergence in securities regulation. The author offers an informed and insightful examination of the implications for regulatory and policy design if regulatory convergence were to be rigorously implemented.

Analyzing the role of governments in the regulation of the new "Information Society", the ten chapters in this book stem from a seminar hosted by the European Media Regulation Seminar Group (ESRG) at the University of Warwick. Each chapter explores the regulatory responses of the UK govermentand the EU to commercial, technical and market convergence in the broadcasting, telecommunications, print media and computing sectors. The text focuses on the establishment of satellite pay-TV, telecommunications and the launch of digital terrestrial TV as they blend real andcyber-governance.

This book provides an up-to-date account and analysis of the development of the European Union's regulatory framework for telecommunications in a globalising world. A key feature is its treatment of the EU's regulatory policy response to technological convergence in the information and communications sector, through its new Electronic Communications Regulatory Framework. The book explores in detail the dynamics of the complex relationship between technological and globalisation pressures, economic interests, and European and national policy responses. The authors also examine the achievements and limitations of over twenty years of EU efforts to liberalise markets and to harmonise regulation.

International Cooperation, Convergence and Harmonization of Pharmaceutical Regulations: A Global Perspective provides the current status of the complex and broad phenomenon of cooperation, convergence and harmonization in the pharmaceutical sector (Part I), thoroughly evaluates its added value and its critical parameters and influencing factors (Part II) in order to recommend actions and measures to support the next steps for cooperation, convergence and harmonization (Part III). All of these recommendations in the book support the establishment of a better coordinated global pharmaceutical system which represents the best realistic alternative to fulfill the objective to establish a global coalition of regulators and to respond to an increased demand to further cooperation in the pharmaceutical sector. This proposed framework, which leverages all of the ongoing positive cooperation initiatives and uses as foundations all of the numerous harmonization projects developed over the years, presents advantages for all stakeholders and would definitively have significant added value to the promotion and protection of global public health. The status of all major worldwide harmonization and cooperation initiatives (at bilateral, regional, and global levels) The value of cooperation in the pharmaceutical sector and the driving factors behind harmonization The proposition of a structure for the global pharmaceutical system and timely recommendations for enhancing international cooperation, as well as further discussion and policy changes in this area

Media convergence is often propounded as inevitable and ongoing. Yet much of the governance of the media sector’s key parts has developed along discrete evolutionary paths, mostly incremental in character. This volume breaks new ground through exploring a diverse range of topics at the heart of the media convergence governance debate, such as next generation networks, spectrum, copyright and media subsidies. It shows how reluctance to accommodate non-market based policy solutions creates conflicts and problems resulting in only shallow media convergence thus far.

This book presents a thorough critical examination of the European regulatory reaction to technological convergence, tracing the explicit and implicit mechanisms through which emerging concerns are incorporated into regulation and competition law, and then goes on to identify the patterns that underlie these responses so as to establish the extent to which the issues at stake, and the implications of intervention, are fully understood and considered by authorities. Focusing on ‘conflict points’ – areas of tension inevitably arising among overlapping regimes – the analysis covers such elements as the following: the provision of ‘multiple-play’ services; the advent of ‘convergent devices’; the interchangeability of transmission networks; subscription-based (‘pay television’) services; the diversification of television services (such as on-demand and niche-theme channels); the relative scarcity of (premium) content; the ‘migration’ of television content with cultural and social relevance to pay television; and the emergence of ‘bottleneck’ segments in the communications value chain. Endorsing the adjustment of existing rules to meet pluralist objectives, the author outlines a single, coherent regulatory approach. He shows how a careful analysis of the implications of technological convergence helps to solve conflicts between regimes. Specifically, the analysis addresses the level – national or EU – at which particular regulatory responses should emerge, the objectives guiding action, and the tools through which these objectives may be pursued. These conclusions command the attention of policymakers, regulators, and lawyers active in the ongoing development of communications law.

This edited volume explores different meanings of media convergence and deconvergence, and reconsiders them in critical and innovative ways. Its parts provide together a broad picture of opposing trends and tensions in media convergence, by underlining the relevance of this powerful idea and emphasizing the misconceptions that it has generated. Sergio Sparviero, Corinna Peil, Gabriele Balbi and the other authors look into practices and realities of users in convergent media environments, ambiguities in the production and distribution of content, changes to the organization of media industries, the re-configuration of media markets, and the influence of policy and regulations. Primarily addressed to scholars and students in different fields of media and communication studies, Media Convergence and Deconvergence deconstructs taken-for-granted concepts and provides alternative and fresh analyses on one of the most popular topics in contemporary media culture. Chapter 1 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com