{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02457956015523933, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004743423889607589, 'mean_word_length': 5.137566137566138, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Sorting Out Deregulation: Protecting Free Speech and Internet Access in The United States, Germany, and Japan by Kim, Jae-Young, (LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2002), pp 196

This book, as one of the series of law and society studies, deals with the problem of telecommunications deregulation from a viewpoint of political economy. The author tries to provide a clearer account of the complex public interest issues as to universal service and freedom of speech on the Internet. Distinguishably from the mainstream of recent literature of this kind, the study pays little attention to the structural or technological feature of Internet itself. Instead, the author tries to search for the power relations between actors such as government and corporations. For this purpose, the study aims to use empirical as well as normative instruments. It is also a rich comparative study, based on the empirical observations made by comparing the situations of three countries: the United States, Germany, and Japan. The book allocates almost half of its total pages to the theoretical problems of political economy. Vincent Mosco’s work on telecommunications policy is widely drawn on. However, despite its subtitle, only two chapters are provided for the empirical and comparative analysis of the tree countries: the situation of universal service (chapter 5) and free speech (chapter 6). The author maintains that the political economy is a way of exploring the social totality. However, in my impression, the study is too much inclined to government-centered analysis. For example, as to Japan, he stresses that the government has taken a very important role in realising telecommunications deregulation, just as in the post-war economic miracle (p 96). This seems an oversimplification. The initiative of government was indeed important in advancing deregulation in Japan. However, without the maturity of private industrial sectors, deregulation can never achieve a competitive and efficient marketplace that has the capacity to sustain public interests such as universal service and free speech. In Japan, many venture companies such as Yahoo BB are also playing a very important role for promoting wider service areas as well as low-cost provision of Internet. The government, gradually losing the trust of people in these