William Melody, PhD, is the Managing Director of LIRNE.NET and the World Dialogue on Regulation for Network Economies (WDR) Programme. He is a Visiting Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark and the London School of Economics, and Emeritus Professor at the Delft University of Technology, NL.
He participated in the earliest stages of telecom reform and computer/communication convergence as Senior and Chief Economist, US FCC, and was an adviser and expert witness on economic and regulatory issues for the US Department of Justice in US v. AT&T, which led to the AT&T divestiture. He has been a major contributor to the research and policy literature for more than 30 years with more that 150 publications in books, reports and professional journals. He is a former editor of Telecommunications Policy, and on the editorial board for several journals. He was editor and author of six chapters in Telecom Reform: Principles, Policies and Regulatory Practices (1997), which has been used in training and university programs in more than 100 countries. He was also on the advisory board of infoDev’s Telecommunications Regulation Handbook and its ICT Technology Toolkit.
Melody has held academic appointments contributing to new program development and research centers on ICTs in seven countries. He has been an invited lecturer at universities, training centers and professional organizations on all continents.