Book review

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) was formed to accelerate standardization and promote greater harmonization among European telecommunications systems. This article describes ETSI's organization and structure and relates them to its expected behaviour and performance....

This article argues that the historic pre- eminence of the ITU in setting international telecommunications standards is likely to be increasingly threatened by the regional standards organizations (RSOs) and by formal or informal coordination among the RSOs. The interests the RSOs represent are...

The Internet has evolved from a “hierarchy”—in which interconnection was achieved by having Internet Service Providers (ISPs) purchase transit services from top-level backbones and top-level backbone providers engage in direct settlement-free peering—to a “mesh” in which peering...

Although economists have written on topics of intellectual property for a long time, the impact of economics on public policy in this area has been slight, especially as compared to the influence of professional writings in areas such as antitrust and taxation. We believe that too few of the...

In a network industry, each firm must decide whether or not it wants its product to be compatible with those of rivals. This horizontal compatibility strategy determines whether competition is a battle to establish a standard or the more conventional competition within a standard. The two forms...