Modern theoretical principles to govern the design of incentive regulation mechanisms are reviewed and discussed. General issues associated with applying these principles in practice are identified. Examples of the actual application of incentive regulation mechanisms to the regulation of prices...

Network neutrality issues have been vigorously debated worldwide over the past few years. One major aim of network neutrality proponents is to prevent high-speed Internet service providers from charging content providers for priority delivery. Recently, proponents have turned their attention to...

Network neutrality is a policy proposal that would regulate how network providers manage and price the use of their networks. Congress has introduced several bills on network neutrality. Proposed legislation generally would mandate that Internet service providers exercise no control over the...

Much of the advocacy of legislatively-mandated network neutrality is based on a simple fallacy - namely, that differing charges to suppliers of content to the Internet for correspondingly differing speeds of delivery are inherently discriminatory. They are not; and an attempt to prohibit them...

A quarter century ago, there was a very influential paper that shaped thinking on how best to design what we now call the Internet. The article offered a design principle called "end-to-end." The idea was to keep the inner part of a computer network as simple as possible and allow the...

This essay examines the economics of "net neutrality" and broadband Internet access. We argue that mandating net neutrality would be likely to reduce economic welfare. Instead, the government should focus on creating competition in the broadband market by liberalizing more spectrum and reducing...

Broadband penetration and available speeds vary widely across OECD countries. Policymakers around the world, and especially in countries like the U.S. that lag in the rankings, are searching for policies to narrow those gaps. Relatively little empirical work tests possible reasons for these...

The Federal Communications Commission has requested comments on the regulation of voice telephone services delivered over the Internet, dubbed "VoIP" or Voice over Internet Protocol. This paper examines whether there is a need to regulate VoIP. We conclude that there is no economic rationale for...

This paper uses a large cross-country survey of business firms to assess their influence on government policies. It is found that influence is associated with larger, government-owned firms that have a high degree of ownership concentration. In contrast, foreign ownership matters little. It is...