Formal regulatory parity can entail counterintuitive effects. In a series of state statutes, municipal governments have been directed to issue cable TV franchises to new competitors only after (a) formal hearings considering the ‘public interest’ in competition; and (b) imposing terms and...

Tragedy of the anti-commons occurs when property rules fail to enable efficient social coordination. In radio spectrum, rights issued to airwave users have traditionally been severely truncated, leaving gains from trade unexploited. The social losses that Ronald Coase (1959) asserted, appealing...

The U.S. telecommunications industry has come under scrutiny amid concerns that regulatory policies have been too permissive. These concerns are perhaps most prominent in the residential broadband market where there is a perception that the “duopoly” between telephone carriers (DSL...

Network neutrality (NN) regulations governing how broadband Internet Service Providers (ISPs) package and price high-speed last mile access are being considered. Advocates say such rules are necessary to separate transport and application layers of the Internet, protecting innovation at the...

The stated rationale for the Fairness Doctrine was to encourage more information to be aired by radio and TV stations, on the theory that private broadcasters would tend to underprovide a public good - news about important social issues. Yet, the danger has been seen, at the U.S. Supreme Court,...

Horizontal merger evaluation is heavily reliant on market definition. While a SSNIP framework formats the analysis, demand elasticity evidence used to apply the test is often sparse, as is often found in high-technology industries. This paper examines other sources of evidence that reveal the...

Over the last decade, the United States and Canada overhauled their telecommunications markets through deregulation, using two different approaches. Because it is less regulation-intensive, the Canadian approach appears to be more desirable in the transition to competition

The 1996 Telecommunications Act seems to be encouraging competition in key segments of the telephone and cable television industries. Stock price data suggest that the wave of "megamergers" in telecommunications-probably an unanticipated result of the Telecommunications Act-is associated with...

Year-end 2006 is scheduled as the date when 1,500 TV stations cease analog broadcasts, continuing in digital format only. Yet, according to a safeguard provision, analog stations will remain in any TV market where fewer than 85 percent of households are equipped to receive digital transmissions...