UCLA School of Law

This text has gone through nine editions across nearly a quarter century. The first edition appeared in 2001, published by Aspen Law & Business. The next three editions were published by Foundation Press, up to 2012. In 2016, Jerry Kang added Alan Butler as a co-author, and we self-published the fifth edition to provide substantial cost savings for students. In 2023, Blake Reid joined the author team, and we released edition 7.5 of the book as a free PDF under a Creative Commons license. In 2024, we released the substantially revised eighth edition with a modest “point-five” update in 2025, formatted for letter-sized paper specifically for those who want to print a copy at home.

This ninth edition of the book features an extensive array of minor updates for consistency and accuracy—what Apple fans might call a “Snow Leopard” release—include streamlining and reorganization of familiar material. But we also couldn’t resist adding some significant new features, including updates on major happenings at the FCC, the Supreme Court, and beyond. We’ve also added a brand-new chapter on Accessibility & Disability that serves as both an introduction to communications disability law and as a capstone for the book, testing familiar concepts from earlier chapters under new circumstances. By popular demand, we restored freshly-relevant materials on ownership and consolidation from an earlier edition. And we added a note on generative AI—not just as a predictable nod to the technology du jour, but as a deliberate opportunity early in the book to reflect on the nature of communications technology, build a foundation for conceptual transfer, and facilitate conversations about AI at the start of the semester. A change log (in chronological order for repeat adopters) follows this preface.

Throughout all editions, the book has retained one fundamental pedagogical principle: Organize learning first by concepts, then by industry. Our goal has been to prioritize a deeper conceptual understanding over industry-specific details because industries, and the technologies that make them possible, are always in flux. The current list of concepts is: (1) power, (2) entry, (3) pricing, (4) explicit content, (5) access, (6) classification, (7) platforms, (8) privacy, and new for the ninth edition (9) disability and accessibility. The book devotes a chapter to each concept, with the first five chapters exploring a particular concept across multiple industries ranging from legacy telephony, broadcast, and cable TV to the modern-day internet. Chapters six and seven explore the concepts of classification and platforms by chronicling the historical rise of internet service providers and user-generated content services, respectively, and their intersection with classical communications law principles. Chapters eight and nine shift toward advanced topics, surveying communications privacy and disability/accessibility topics appropriate for both communications law courses and privacy/disability law courses, respectively. Although law and technology have evolved over the past quarter century, the book’s pedagogical commitments have remained the same.

Zooming out: this book remains a horizontal survey of the broad field of communications law, not a vertically comprehensive reference on any particular subfield. Our collective decades of experience teaching and practicing communications law have taught us that students and practitioners often end up working in unexpected industries or areas, from wireless spectrum policy to regulatory compliance for legacy media industries to disability access to the privacy and cybersecurity of communications networks. This book is tailored to help readers not only grapple with such specific law and policy silos, but to appreciate how they interrelate more broadly to the shared concepts mentioned above. The payoff is greater facility in recognizing patterns and disconnects, uncovering the underlying structural features of recurring problems, communicating more effectively with colleagues through comparisons and metaphors, and adapting to rapid technological and social change.