Panel data analysis for the U.S. states indicates that the speed of broadband diffusion is clearly driven by inter-platform competition while competition on the platform has an ambiguous if not negative impact. The diffusion speed diminishes with the number of firms and the size of the firms....

The U.S. telecommunications industry has come under scrutiny amid concerns that regulatory policies have been too permissive. These concerns are perhaps most prominent in the residential broadband market where there is a perception that the “duopoly” between telephone carriers (DSL...

Looking backwards on the occasion of Telecommunications Policy’s fortieth anniversary reveals just how far U.S. communications policy has come. All of the major challenges of 1976, such as promoting competition in customer premises equipment, long distance, and television networking, have...

This paper seeks to shed some light both on how economy-wide and infrastructure or sector-specific components of the regulatory framework should be designed and on what the respective roles of such components should be to maximize the efficiency of economic regulation in telecommunications. It...

The "net neutrality" principle has triggered a heated debate and advocates have proposed policy interventions. In this paper, we provide perspective by framing issues in terms of the positive economic factors at work. We stress the incentives of market participants, and highlight the economic...

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a trend in "work-from-home (WFH)," but workers need reliable and fast internet connections (e.g., broadband) to work from home. Yet, as of January 2020, 18 states had legally restricted local governments and cooperatives from building their own broadband...

There is significant debate over whether there remains a last-mile broadband bottleneck. In this paper, we explore what might be the nature of this bottleneck and review options for regulatory responses. Building on our work in CommAct2021, we expand on our discussion of the need for a reformed...

The Federal Communications Commission is coming under intense political pressure to reclassify broadband Internet access as a common carrier telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act. Yet, almost no attention has been directed at the fine details of how reclassification...

Central features of today's electronic communications markets are complementarities between the different layers of the value chain, substitutability between some applications, network effects in the provision of content and services, two-sided business models that partly involve indirect...

This paper presents a model of competition between an incumbent and an entrant firm in telecommunications. The entrant has the option to enter the market with or without having preliminary invested in its own infrastructure; in case of facility based entry, the entrant has also the option to...