This book is both a beginning and an end. Its publication marks the beginning of TechFreedom, a new non-profit think tank that will launch alongside this book in January 2011. Our mission is simple: to unleash the progress of technology that improves the human condition and expands individual capacity to choose. This book also marks an end, having been conceived while I was Director of the Center for Internet Freedom at The Progress & Freedom Foundation—before PFF ceased operations in October 2010, after seventeen years.
Yet this book is just as much a continuation of the theme behind both PFF and TechFreedom: "progress as freedom." As the historian Robert Nisbet so elegantly put it: "the condition as well as the ultimate purpose of progress is the greatest possible degree of freedom of the individual." This book's twenty-six contributors explore this theme and its interaction with relentless technological change from a wide variety of perspectives.
Personally, this book is the perfect synthesis of the themes and topics that set me down the path of studying Internet policy in the late 1990s, and weaves together most of the major books and authors that have influenced the evolution of my own thinking on cyberlaw and policy. I hope this collection of essays will offer students of the field the kind of authoritative survey that would have greatly accelerated my own studies. Even more, I hope this volume excites and inspires those who may someday produce similar scholarship of their own—perhaps to be collected in a similar volume celebrating another major Internet milestone.
Next Digital Decade
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