Neue Regulierungsstrukturen fuer Kommunikationsnetze - Ueberblick und oekonomische Analyse aus der Perspektive von Mehrwertdiensten

During the last years many network industries experienced drastic changes in their regulatory framework, which were driven by reforms on the EU-level. The telecommunication sector is the frontrunner of this process. Motivated by the hope for higher productivity and increasing macroeconomic growth rates, important deregulation and privatization measures were undertaken. The first topic of this paper is to summarize these regulatory changes and their impacts. As a second topic, the specific situation of value added services,which are dependent on the access to the network bottleneck, is analyzed. The economic analysis of these access conditions is extremely relevant, because many value added services do not have a realistic alternative to the established bottleneck provider. Furthermore, and perhaps more important, the former monopolists are downstream integrated and therefore rivals on the level of many value added services.