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The Wires Go To War: The U.S. Experiment With Government Ownership Of The Telephone System During World War I, Michael A. Janson, Christopher S. Yoo
The Wires Go To War: The U.S. Experiment With Government Ownership Of The Telephone System During World War I, Michael A. Janson, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
One of the most distinctive characteristics of the U.S. telephone system is that it has always been privately owned, in stark contrast to the pattern of government ownership followed by virtually every other nation. What is not widely known is how close the United States came to falling in line with the rest of the world. For the one-year period following July 31, 1918, the exigencies of World War I led the federal government to take over the U.S. telephone system. A close examination of this episode sheds new light into a number of current policy issues. The history confirms …
Deregulation Vs. Reregulation Of Telecommunications: A Clash Of Regulatory Paradigms, Christopher S. Yoo
Deregulation Vs. Reregulation Of Telecommunications: A Clash Of Regulatory Paradigms, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
For the past several decades, U.S. policymakers and the courts have charged a largely deregulatory course with respect to telecommunications. During the initial stages, these decisionmakers responded to technological improvements by narrowing regulation to cover only those portions of industry that remained natural monopolies and deregulating those portions that became open to competition. Eventually, Congress began regulating individual network components rather than services, mandating that incumbent local telephone companies provide unbundled access to any network element. As these elements became open to competition, the courts prompted the Federal Communications Commission to release almost the entire network from unbundling obligations. The …
Toward A Unified Theory Of Access To Local Telephone Systems, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
Toward A Unified Theory Of Access To Local Telephone Systems, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
One of the most distinctive developments in telecommunications policy over the past few decades has been the increasingly broad array of access requirements regulatory authorities have imposed on local telephone providers. In so doing, policymakers did not fully consider whether the justifications for regulating telecommunications remained valid. They also allowed each access regime to be governed by its own pricing methodology and set access prices in a way that treated each network component as if it existed in isolation. The result was a regulatory regime that was internally inconsistent, vulnerable to regulatory arbitrage, and unable to capture the interactions among …
Rethinking Broadband Internet Access, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
Rethinking Broadband Internet Access, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The emergence of broadband Internet technologies, such as cable modem and digital subscriber line (DSL) systems, has reopened debates over how the Internet should be regulated. Advocates of network neutrality and open access to cable modem systems have proposed extending the regulatory regime developed to govern conventional telephone and narrowband Internet service to broadband. A critical analysis of the rationales traditionally invoked to justify the regulation of telecommunications networks--such as natural monopoly, network economic effects, vertical exclusion, and the dangers of ruinous competition--reveals that those rationales depend on empirical and theoretical preconditions that do not apply to broadband. In addition, …