With a sluggish economy, high unemployment, and unprecedented deficit spending, growing the economy and curbing federal spending are top priorities in Washington. A now-popular target for reform is regulation, which even President Obama claims to have "stifled innovation" and to have had "a...

For decades, economists have encouraged regulators to implement more efficient telephone pricing policies in order to eliminate the pervasive cross-subsidies from usage-based services to basic connections. Slowly, and reluctantly, regulators have moved in this direction. The most recent...

Proposed legislation in California (Assembly Bill No. 437) aims to prohibit actors from voluntarily selling something they are willing to sell— contractual exclusivity. In this BULLETIN, we demonstrate that the proposed California legislation will reduce the compensation to actors, either...

Prior to the invention of the Internet, shopping for goods was relatively simple: a consumer visited a brick-and-mortal retailer and selected a product from what was available or, for some retailers, shopped using a catalog. Today, a simple Internet search may return a bewildering number of...

For the last twenty years, promoting broadband adoption has been a focal point of communications policy around the world. Despite significant advances, there is still much work to be done. To help bridge this adoption gap, in many countries private communications companies are now offering...

When a terrestrial radio station plays a song during its over-the-air broadcast, the artists and their record labels receive no compensation for the sound recording right. Yet radio's digital competitors — including streaming services and satellite radio — do pay performance royalties to...

We attempt to shed some light on the optimal design of Commission rules and practices for addressing interference disputes. Since spectrum licenses produce no benefits without large and mostly sunk investments in communications networks, our focus is on investment incentives. We argue that the...

According to the music recording industry, YouTube, one of the largest purveyors of on-demand digital music, evades paying market rates for the use of copyrighted content by exploiting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's “safe harbor” provisions. The source of the distortion in licensing...

Last fall, the Federal Communications Commission issued an Order on Reconsideration and Eighth Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to establish a clear set of rules for public safety spectrum located in the 4.9 GHz band. Among other reforms, the Notice proposes to centralize non-public safety...

In this paper, we attempt to shed light on an important policy question: Does the current way by which providers compensate each other for the exchange of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), wireless, local, and long distance calls inhibit broadband deployment? This question is timely, as the...