James B. Speta

A Sensible Next Step on Network Neutrality: The Market Power Question

Two years ago, disagreement on network neutrality stalled momentum to reform the aging Communications Act. Significantly, both sides of the debate have become hardened, in part because of differing views on the market power of Internet access providers and their ability to foreclose competition. However, neither the FCC nor other government authorities have taken a position on the matter, even in the FCCx92s recent network neutrality adjudication. This essay proposes a way forward, by immediately adopting truth-in-advertising and no-blocking rules and by beginning a comprehensive, rigorous inquiry into the state of the broadband market x96 starting with the market power question.

Modeling an Antitrust Regulator for Telecoms

The diverse and excellent set of authors assembled in this book sheds light on the continuing and conflicting calls for deregulation and re-regulation of important industries and informs the ongoing, increasingly global, policy debate over the evolving line between regulation and general competition policy. The purpose of this book is to understand the debate and its policy implications, focusing on the traditionally regulated sectors of telecommunications and energy, and comparing approaches in the European Union and the United States.

Rewriting U.S. telecommunications law with an eye on Europe

The United States needs a new communications law, one that replaces obsolete service-specific regulatory categories with a law that recognises converging technologies and increasing competition. The European Union’s 2002 New Regulatory Framework provides an important example of such a law. This paper discusses a new U.S. law with an eye on the Framework, arguing that the U.S. should generally follow the Framework’s use of competition law reasoning as the trigger for regulation and its emphasis on maintaining interconnection. The paper notes that E.U. competition law, as embodied in the Framework, adopts theories of joint market dominance and monopoly leveraging that do not fit well with U.S. models. And the paper argues that a new U.S. statute must reform spectrum law to eliminate government allocation and uses, as the Framework does not, and take a more limited approach to universal service than does the Framework.