The United States has recently reinvigorated its efforts to promote ubiquitous broadband at affordable prices for all Americans by both committing over $7.2 billion in stimulus funds and by requiring the Federal Communications Commission to issue a “National Broadband Plan.” The big policy...

The Federal Communications Commission is coming under intense political pressure to reclassify broadband Internet access as a common carrier telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act. Yet, almost no attention has been directed at the fine details of how reclassification...

The Federal Communications Commission’s recently proposed “nondiscrimination” principle in its Open Internet NPRM is shown to be incompatible with established definitions of discrimination in the economics literature and communications jurisprudence

Under Section 629 of the Communications Act, Congress directed the FCC to adopt regulations to promote a retail market for set-top boxes. The Commission's first attempt was the ill-fated CableCard experiment, which - by the Commission's own admission - was a dismal failure. In response, the...

In this paper, we disprove claims by proponents of increased Internet regulation that Broadband Service Providers (“BSPs”) - such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint-Nextel, Qwest, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable - make “record profits,” “substantial profits,” and “soaring profits.” By...

One important concern for the upcoming and highly-complex voluntary incentive auctions for broadcast television spectrum is the degree to which the largest mobile wireless providers will be allowed to participate. Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice encouraged the Federal Communications...

Since broadband distribution networks, both wireless and wireline, require large levels of capital expenditures on long-lived assets, a Broadband Service Provider's incentive to invest in modern broadband infrastructure is influenced not only by current regulation but also by expectations...

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 aimed to “provide for a procompetitive, de-regulatory national policy framework designed to accelerate rapidly private sector deployment of advanced telecommunications and information technologies and services to all Americans….” Key to the Federal...

With the rising cost of broadcast programming and the high-profile of “blackouts,” Retransmission Consent has earned a place at the forefront of the modern communications policy debate. To provide a framework under which to evaluate the issue, we present in this PAPER an economic theory of...