The suboptimal state of communications technology used by public safety agencies has emerged as a high profile political issue. In most cases, public safety agencies are able only to communicate using antiquated networks, engineered solely for providing voice communications and unable to...

As described in Ronald Coase's seminal 1959 paper, property-like rights in electromagnetic spectrum and a secondary market for spectrum licenses will allocate spectrum to its highest and best uses, to the benefit of telecommunications consumers. However, defining rights to use spectrum is far...

The success of airline deregulation challenged the claims of public choice theory, which asserts that regulation serves the purposes of the regulated firms themselves. One prominent explanation for airline deregulation is that "political entrepreneurs" can, under certain circumstances, challenge...

The stance of antitrust oversight of standard setting activities remains a work-in-progress. Over time, antitrust authorities have grown increasingly hospitable to cooperative standard setting efforts whereby jointly developed standards will facilitate the development of new products or...

The United States economy cannot grow without continued innovation. By boosting productivity and creating higher paying jobs, innovation supplies the X-factor that facilitates economic prosperity. Although innovation is fundamental to economic growth, other economic concerns often overshadow...

With the increasing international focus on the future of the ITU and its role (or lack thereof) in Internet governance, there is greater attention being paid to the fact that much of the 'governance' of the Internet is in fact carried out by so-called 'multistakeholder ('MSH') organizations.'...

The increasing centrality of the Internet in modern communications, together with massive changes in the landscape of the telecommunications market, have intensified the calls for Congress to overhaul the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In this paper, we analyze this looming legislative...

The scarcity of wireless spectrum reflects a costly failure of regulation. In practice, large swaths of spectrum are vastly underused or used for low value activities, but the regulatory system prevents innovative users from gaining access to such spectrum through marketplace transactions. In...

Most debates over the structure of merger review in the telecommunications industry focus on the criticism that the role of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is entirely redundant in light of the review conducted by the antitrust agencies. The FCC's lack of a consistently applied...