Series Editor's Introduction

It is one thing to acknowledge that the Internet is a sociotechnical system, quite another to fully incorporate both the social and the technical sides into decision-making for the network and its uses. Putting politics to the side, the greatest challenge for those involved with information and communication policy today is bringing the technical and legal communities together in a common conversation. There have been technical decisions made in ignorance or disregard of legal constraints and policy\ problems that might or would ensue and, conversely, laws put in place by policymakers who so little understood the technologies being regulated that the statutes or regulations were impossible to implement, bearing no relation to how the systems of concern actually work. The challenges are many, for the modes of thinking, language, and types of specific focal problems that must be addressed—and how they are framed—differ across multiple dimensions