This Policy Bulletin examines the Federal Communications Commission's decision to remove "new" Bell Operating Company fiber and "hybrid-fiber" facilities from the unbundling requirements of the 1996 Telecommunications Act as part of its Triennial Review. This Policy Bulletin demonstrates that...

After a brief discussion on expected and actual investment behavior in the telecommunications industry after the 1996 Act, an econometric model is used to quantify the relationship between UNE-P competition and Bell Operating Company investments in telecommunications plant. Using...

The purpose of this POLICY BULLETIN is to evaluate the robustness of the empirical results presented in PHOENIX CENTER POLICY BULLETIN NO. 5, Competition and Bell Company Investment in Telecommunications Plant: The Effects of UNE-P. To accomplish this goal, this POLICY BULLETIN incorporates the...

This Policy Bulletin measures the gains to consumer welfare of the new "all distance"/"all you can eat" competition produced by the market-opening provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Analysis reveals that the consumer welfare gain amounts to approximately $10 billion per year, and...

Fifty years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter warned the Federal Communications Commission not to view competition in an abstract, sterile way. To illustrate the dangers of using such an abstract approach to the key issue of ILEC market power, this paper uses the Commission's...

For decades, economists have encouraged regulators to implement more efficient telephone pricing policies in order to eliminate the pervasive cross-subsidies from usage-based services to basic connections. Slowly, and reluctantly, regulators have moved in this direction. The most recent...

This Paper explores asks a very fundamental question: If meaningful, facilities-based competition and "de-regulation" for telecommunications and information services (and, a fortiori, competition and de-regulation for electricity as well) really is the end-goal of this whole "restructuring"...

This POLICY PAPER examines whether there is a relationship between regulated rates for "unbundled local loops" and deployment of broadband technology by incumbents and entrants. Using an econometric model that analyzes 2002 and 2003 local loop rates and takes into account price variability and...

The Federal Communications Commission’s recently proposed “nondiscrimination” principle in its Open Internet NPRM is shown to be incompatible with established definitions of discrimination in the economics literature and communications jurisprudence

American antitrust law protects consumers against anticompetitive conduct primarily through Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, both of which are concurrently enforced by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”). In addition to enforcing the Sherman Act, the FTC is...