There can be no doubt that the FANG companies – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, as well as Twitter – have transformed society since their emergence. Like all social transformations, the changes wrought by their services have had ripple effects that are both positive and negative. On...

We compare the economic efficiency of imposing a “zero price rule” on Broadband Internet Service Providers (BISPs) with the economic efficiency associated with allowing the BISP to charge Content and Application Service Providers (CASPs) a non-discriminatory uniform price for...

United States v. Terminal Railroad Association, the essential facilities doctrine has been applied to a wide variety of business contexts - from football stadiums to the New York Stock Exchange. However, courts have also declined to extend the doctrine to a wide variety of situations. Despite...

This paper contributes to the discussion of how Public Private Interplay (PPI) can be used to foster Next Generation Access (NGA) buildouts in Europe by introducing the experience of Japan. Japan, which succeeded in both promoting nationwide network buildouts and fostering competitive dynamics...

An important reason for the Internet's remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the "end-to-end" principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap...

The new European framework directive contains a number of policy objectives in the area of net neutrality. In support of these objectives, the universal service directive includes a transparency obligation for ISPs. This paper proposes a multi-stakeholder model for the implementation of this...

We study the strategic choice of compatibility between two initially incompatible network goods in a two-stage game played by an incumbent and an entrant firm. Compatibility may be achieved by means of a converter. We derive a number of results under different assumptions about the nature of the...

The majority of industrial organizations literature on network externalities looks at firm behavior under given market characteristics. The present paper instead asks the question whether the presence of network externalities can change market characteristics, specifically, whether an initially...

Markets undergoing fast-paced product evolution impose a significant informational demand on consumers. They may have to decide among relatively heterogeneous offers while lacking the knowledge required for a fully assessed choice of suppliers. In this case, one important information source is...

I present a vertical differentiation model to assess the quality-wise strategy of an incumbent telecommunications operator under open access regimes. I show that it is always profitable for an incumbent subject to wholesale regulation to degrade wholesale quality in a non-recoverable fashion....