A few recent contributions have claimed that in high-tech industries—where innovation is often cumulative and products include many components which are protected by patents in the hands of many different patent holders—the cost of obtaining all necessary licenses is too high. Some have even...

This note analyses the competitiveness of different segments of the telecommunications markets in the five countries (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile) shows that those countries that have relied on a proper balance between antitrust and sector-specific regulation...

Among the countries that have fully liberalized their telecommunications sector, some have chosen to rely mainly on sector-specific rules often (but not always) applied by sector-specific institutions, while others have focused mainly on economy-wide antitrust rules and institutions to control...

There is a large strand of legal and economic literature suggesting the FRAND regime is broken and that standardization is at risk given “hold-up and “royalty stacking” problems. A variety of proposals have been made to address these alleged problems, most of which seeking to decrease the...

This paper provides an overview of the efforts of the European Commission to identify and, when necessary, challenge anticompetitive behaviour with respect to standardization and the licensing of standardized technologies, as well as the case-law of the CJEU on the same subject. The paper starts...

The creation of a growing number of agencies at the EU level is one of the most significant developments in the administrative structure of the EU. These agencies play a useful role as they allow the Commission to decentralize a number of scientific, technical, or observatory functions to...

This short paper responds to the criticisms made by Richard Vary on observations that I have made in one of my papers on the issue of whether, as a result of their FRAND commitment (or their obligations under EU competition law), standard-essential patents (“SEPs”) holders are under an...

This paper seeks to shed some light both on how economy-wide and infrastructure or sector-specific components of the regulatory framework should be designed and on what the respective roles of such components should be to maximize the efficiency of economic regulation in telecommunications. It...