Broadband is widely recognized as a key platform for enabling and supporting job creation, economic development, and innovation in both the short- and long-terms. Many recent policy debates have focused on spurring the deployment of wired broadband networks to unserved parts of the country....

A growing number of communities across the United States are adopting policies to promote advanced telecommunication services, including broadband access. This paper offers a taxonomy for classifying these local government initiatives and provides preliminary empirical results for a sample of...

This essay, written three years before the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, is a reminder of how little has been accomplished in deregulating telecommunications. In 1993, I erroneously predicted that American telecommunications regulation was about to collapse like the walls of...

The United States has asymmetric regulation of the provision of broadband Internet access service. A cable television system operator is not regulated in its sale of cable modem service. In contrast, an incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) that offers digital subscriber line (DSL) service...

This paper considers what limited roles the FCC may lawfully assume to ensure timely and fair interconnection and compensation agreements in the Internet ecosystem. The paper examines the FCC’s limited role in broadcaster-cable television retransmission consent negotiations with an eye toward...

In the postal and telecommunications sectors, operators and users’ groups employ regulatory specialists to monitor policy developments and to attempt to influence the direction those developments take. Among the contacts with whom these regulatory specialists must, in doing so, engage, are...

Licensed to nonprofit educational entities, the 2500-2690 MHz band of spectrum has been plagued by overly intrusive governmental policy since its inception over forty years ago. As a consequence, this spectrum is woefully underutilized. In 2004, the Federal Communications Commission recognized...

Since the nineteenth century, the state has played different roles in telecommunications, from owner-operator and regulator to facilitator of private sector activities. Whereas direct government involvement has diminished since the 1980s, recent years have witnessed renewed demands for...

This paper has two related objectives. First, it seeks to identify the key determinants of some policies that have been at the heart of the reforms of the telecommunications industry in developing countries, namely, liberalization, privatization, and the (re)structuring of regulation. Second, it...

Since it became involved in telecommunications during the course of the nineteenth century, the state has played several roles in telecommunications: owner-operator, regulator, facilitator, and stopgap for private sector deficiencies. During the past two decades direct state involvement in...