Since the fall of 2008, a debate has raged in Washington over "targeted online advertising," shorthand for the customization of Internet ads to match the interests of users. Not only are these ads more relevant and therefore less annoying to Internet users than untargeted ads, they are more...

The Federal Trade Commission should avoid laying the groundwork for more onerous regulation of the online advertising marketplace, which could become the equivalent of a disastrous industrial policy for the Internet and choke resources needed to fuel e-commerce and online free speech going...

Matthew Lasar asks the $64,000 question on Ars Technica: "Did Congress really give the FCC power to protect the Net? The jurisdictional question, as Lasar notes, lies at the heart of the viability of the FCC's proposed net neutrality rules. The answer depends on one's view of what regulatory...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cohen v. U.S. (No. 08-5088) rebuffed an attempt by the IRS to treat as a general statement of policy a Notice by which it both conceded its refund obligation for certain improperly collected telephone excise taxes and established a binding and exclusive...

The United States moved closer to Net Neutrality regulation this year when the Federal Communications Commission found that Comcast, a cable broadband Internet service provider, violated a set of Internet policy principles the FCC adopted in 2005 by limiting peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic. The...

An important part of the literature on regulatory economics is based on the US experience, where a well-established regulator faces a privately owned monopoly. It is sometimes forgotten that this model does not apply in many places where a newly established regulator faces a government owned, or...

Our market modelling approach aims at practically determining wholesale pricing policies for the switch from copper to fibre access networks. It asks which market equilibria for incumbents and entrants result from different combinations of copper and fibre wholesale access charges. We first...

It is common knowledge that Next Generation Access (NGA) networks require significant investments and that for many regions, especially in more rural areas, there is no viable business case. In this paper a bottom-up cost modelling approach is applied to determine the investment and cost of...

Almost a decade after Argentina began privatizing its railways, resolution of the conflicts between regulators, users and operators continues to take longer, and to be more difficult than expected. This paper shows that many of these conflicts arose because there are no rule of interactions...