Access Regulation in Postal Delivery in the EU : Lessons from the History of Telecommunications Regulation

Abstract: There have been recent calls for new regulation of package delivery in the EU. We provide a detailed description of the evolution of access regulation in the telecommunications industry in the EU and package delivery services in the EU to examine lessons from the telecommunications access regulation experience for package delivery. We find that assets thought to be bottlenecks necessary for competition in telecom markets were circumvented in unexpected ways. Access obligations not only impeded investment in purported bottleneck facilities, but impeding such investment was particularly costly to social welfare for markets, such as broadband telecommunications, which are the object of substantial investment and innovation. Recent calls to impose access obligations on e-commerce companies to protect competition in package delivery are therefore particularly fraught