Communications and Society Program

About the Aspen IDEA Project

The Aspen IDEA Project As governments, businesses, and individuals reassess the nature and significance of the Internet—with its increasing scale of information, users, connections, and mobility—a thorough reassessment of the existing institutions that govern the global Internet is critical. How will we assure universality, openness and freedom? What global institutions, norms and forums will secure the free flow of communications while protecting individual freedoms?

The Aspen Institute IDEA Project is an internationally inclusive forum that engages corporations, civil society and government officials to identify ways to foster the freedom to connect; preserve open, end-to-end networks; and reassess the international regime that facilitates the free flow of communications across borders on a unified Internet.

The Aspen Institute IDEA Project is led by Reed Hundt, former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. Dr. Peter Cowhey, Dean of the University of California, San Diego School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, spearheads the efforts to develop policies that will update the international regime for Internet communications, and Charlie Firestone, Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, is overseeing the project on behalf of the Aspen Institute.

The Aspen Institute IDEA Project conducts its work through a series of forums with select groups of leaders from foreign countries, competing industries and the non-profit sector.

In its first phase, under the managing directorship of Gary Epstein, the project had financial support from a consortium of charitable foundations, including the Markle Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation. The first Report of the Project, Toward A Single Global Digital Economy, was released on April 24, 2012.