Law Commons^™

Did At&T Die In Vain? An Empirical Comparison Of At&T And Bell Canada, Eli M. Noam

Federal Communications Law Journal

"The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective."' Conference held at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on April 18-19, 2008.

Did the Divestiture of AT&T achieve its purpose? It is helpful to turn to Canada, whose telecommunications industry and regulation were similar but which did not experience a divestiture. Since AT&T was split up in 1982-4, national telecom market concentration in the U.S. has bounced back to a national duopoly structure, with an HHI concentration index of 2,986, higher than for Canada's similar national duopoly with an HHI of 2,463. Local telecom wireline competition is …

The Bell System Divestiture: Background, Implementation, And Outcome, Joseph H. Weber

Federal Communications Law Journal

"The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective."' Conference held at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on April 18-19, 2008.

By 1982, the Bell System had operated an integrated telecommunications network connecting almost everyone in the United States for almost 100 years. That system had been designed and operated as a monopoly, but by the 1960s, new technologies were being developed which led to pressure to allow competitive entry. After many incremental changes, the Bell System divestiture--complete separation of long-distance service and manufacturing fiom local service provision-was finally adopted as a way of implementing this …

Toward A Unified Theory Of Access To Local Telephone Networks, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo

Federal Communications Law Journal

"The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective."' Conference held at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on April 18-19, 2008.

Over the past several decades, regulatory authorities have imposed an increasingly broad array of access requirements on local telephone providers. In so doing, policymakers typically applied previous approaches to access regulation without fully considering whether the regulatory justifications used in favor of those previous access requirements remained valid. They also allowed each access regime to be governed by a different pricing methodology and set access prices in a way that treated each network component as …

Reexamining The Legacy Of Dual Regulation: Reforming Dual Merger Review By The Doj And The Fcc, Philip J. Weiser

Federal Communications Law Journal

"The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective."' Conference held at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on April 18-19, 2008.

A central challenge for competition policy merger review is to structure the analysis of merger remedies so that the antitrust agencies play an effective and central role, with regulatory agencies complementing-as opposed to overlapping or contradicting--their judgments. At present, the U.S. system sometimes veers towards a worst-case scenario where federal antitrust authorities-the FTC and DOJ-impose regulatory remedies that overlap with regulatory policy and regulatory agencies perform duplicative merger reviews and impose remedies unrelated to the …

The Politics Of Competition: Review Of Clifford Winston's Government Failure Versus Market Failure: Microeconomics Policy Research And Government Performance And Mark K. Landy, Martin A. Levin & Martin Shapiro, Eds., Creating Competitive Markets: The Politics Of Regulatory Reform, Russell P. Hanser

Federal Communications Law Journal

Two recent books focus attention on the role of regulation in the modem economy and the reasons why efforts at deregulation succeed or fail. Clifford Winston's Government Failure Versus Market Failure: Microeconomics Policy Research and Government Performance reviews empirical studies of regulation and its alternatives, arguing that economic regulation has quite often done more harm than good. In Creating Competitive Markets: The Politics of Regulatory Reform, editors Mark K. Landy, Martin A. Levin and Martin Shapiro collect essays addressing the political dangers faced by those pursuing market liberalization, both before and (especially) after reform is enacted. Read together, these books …