Bernard Roy

Social Costs and Benefits of the Universal Service Obligation in the Postal Market

The universal service obligation (USO) is a cornerstone of regulatory policy in the postal sector. In the EU, where the sector is headed towards full liberalization, the USO is the major argument used to advocate some residual regulation. In the postal sector, like in many other network industries, universal service was historically provided by a monopolistic public or regulated operator. While the need for monopoly protection has been increasingly disputed, the very idea of universal service has remained relatively uncontested during the early stages of the liberalization process. The debate was not that much about the appropriate extent of the USO but about the most efficient (or least costly) way to make it competitively neutral, or at least as compatible as possible with competition. This in itself is a challenging question. More recently, however, the USO in itself has increasingly been questioned. The question is whether the social benefits associated with the USO are significant enough to justify its cost and in particular the impediment to competition it often implies. The spectacular development of electronic communications is likely to further fuel this debate. To ensure a sound design of the future regulatory context in the postal sector, it is important not to restrict this debate to political or ideological considerations. The underlying economic aspects are of crucial importance and have to be given thorough consideration. While there are some papers in the literature that deal with this issue, it appears fair to say that most of the contributions on USO have concentrated on the “how” (to implement) rather than on the “why” (to impose it and to what extent). This is true to some extent for all network industries but even more so for the postal sector.

Réseau intégré ou réseaux spécialisés

RésuméĽ accroissement et la diversification de la demande de services de télécommunication a été à ľ origine de la création de réseaux ou ď équipements dédiés. Et ľ émergence de nouveaux réseaux pourrait s’intensifier avec ľ accroissement de la concurrence, la libéralisation des infrastructures et la nécessité de préempter les marchés. Paradoxalement, cette situation propice à ľ éclatement du réseau général se produit au moment oú la technologie semble mûre pour la naissance ď un grand réseau capable de supporter ľ ensemble des services actuels et futurs. La premiére partie de cet article décrit les technologies constitutives ďun réseau à large bande et examine le cas où un monopole cherche à promouvoir ce réseau. Puis, seront introduits les effets ľ une concurrence frontale fondée sur ľécrémage. On verra dans ce cadre comment la fragile soutenabilité du réseau à large bande affecte la solution théorique fondée sur le réseau intégré unique. Il sera finalement possible de dresser un bilan des avantages et inconvénients respectifs des solutions dédiées et intégrées, et ľexaminer les solutions de semi-intégration qui pourraient émerger.AbstractThe increase of telecommunications services demand has been so far satisfied by the creation of new networks or dedicated equipments. The emergence of new networks could stress through the density of competition, the liberalization of infrastructures and the market preemption strategies. Paradoxically this situation leading to burst the general network occurs as technology evolution matures into the alternative of providing a great broadband network, able to support the whole set of today’s and tomorrow’s services. In this paper, first will be considered the case in which the monopoly promotes the broadband network. Then the effects of cream-skimming competition will be introduced. This shall allow to observe how the fragile sustainability of the broadband network disturbs the theoretical solution based on a single integrated network. This will lead to draw up a balance sheet of the respective advantages and drawbacks of integrated and dedicated solutions, and consider the opportunity of half-integrated networks emergence.