Implications of Network Convergence on Local Access Regulation in the U.S. and the EU

Margit Vanberg

No 07-039, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of telecommunications regulation in the U.S. and in Europe. For each region the history of telecommunications regulations as well as the current regulatory regime is portrayed. The focus of this overview is on the question of how unbundling regulations in the local access market have evolved in parallel to the convergence of telecommunications with Internet and broadcasting services. The criteria used by the regulatory authorities to identify those network elements which incumbents are required to offer to competitors at regulated rates are compared to the criteria provided by the ?essential facilities doctrine?, a concept used in antitrust law. The analysis concludes that U.S. deregulation has gone too far with respect to some broadband access markets while in Europe, a severe tendency to overregulation is observed.

Keywords: network convergence; unbundling regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L15 L43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-eec, nep-net and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/24603/1/dp07039.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:5698

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().