In spite of not being ‘public goods’ in the strict sense of the term, public provision has been a common way of supplying utilities services around the world. Among the major reasons underlying the dominant position of the public sector as the provider of infrastructure are the recognition...

This chapter considers the relationship between nondiscrimination rules and supply-side incentives to invest in infrastructure. We encountered the issue throughout chapter 6. This chapter frames and evaluates the oft -made claim that government-imposed commons management will significantly...

This chapter considers partially (non)rival infrastructure and congestion. Specifically, it explains and analyzes congestions problems and solutions. It begins with the basic economic model of congestion, which assumes homogenous uses, and discusses various approaches to managing congestion. It...

Infrastructure resources are at the center of many contentious public policy debates, ranging from what to do about our crumbling roads and bridges, to whether and how to protect of our natural environment, to patent law reform, to electromagnetic spectrum allocation, to providing universal...

This chapter explores how infrastructure theory applies to the Internet and in particular the network neutrality debate. The chapter demonstrates how the infrastructure analysis, with its focus on demand-side issues and the function of commons management, reframes the network neutrality debate,...

In this paper, we will analyse further the issue of concurrence between competition and sector rules and the relation between parallel concepts within the two different legal frameworks. We will firstly examine Third Party Access in relation to essential facilities doctrine and refusal of access...

In this paper we especially focus on the issue of incentives to invest in relation to forced sharing of essential facilities and infrastructure in developing markets, where innovation plays a key role. We evaluate the economic consequences of third party access to the obliged to grant access...

A recent phenomenon in competition policy is the acquisition of a private firm by an enterprise that is either wholly owned by government or in the midst of privatization. Such an acquisition poses the question of how public ownership may alter the incentives of a firm to engage in...

With three waves of internal energy market legislation already adopted and a fourth just tabled, a key question is “do we have an institutional structure that can effectively deliver the ambitious goals of the EU energy and climate change policy?”. To answer this question, the chapter...

In this article, we examine the open access debate in the context of cable services and broadband Internet services from an antitrust framework. Our analysis is prompted by the recent AT&T-MediaOne and AOL-Time Warner mergers, which raise issues concerning the impact of integrated cable content...