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The Enduring Lessons Of The Breakup Of At&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective, 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.

The Decline And Fall Of At&T: A Personal Recollection, Richard A. Posner

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.

In his luncheon talk at the conference, presented here in slightly revised form, Judge Posner discusses his personal involvement with the events that led up the Justice Department's major antitrust suit against AT&T that culminated in the breakup of the telephone monopoly. The stages of his involvement included participation in the work of President Johnson's Task Force on Communications Policy, consulting for AT&T in the lawsuit itself, and his negative advice to the chairman of …

An Oligopoly Analysis Of At&T'S Performance In The Wireline Long- Distance Markets After Divestiture, Paul W. Macavoy

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.

The antitrust law books promise competition from breaking up the monopoly firm in a Sherman Act case remedy. Not in this case; the question is what "kind" of oligopoly.

Will Access Regulation Work?, Gerald R. Faulhaber

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.

The FCC is transitioning from a rate regulation regime to an access regime. A rate regulation regime gives all customers full access to network facilities (common carrier) at regulated rates-generally, rate base rate of return regulation. An access regime is one in which all competitors are given full access to incumbents' networks, with little or no retail rate regulation, thereby allowing competition (over incumbents' networks) to discipline the market. Is this a good idea? Is …

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 …

Essential Facilities And Trinko: Should Antitrust And Regulation Be Combined?, Timothy J. Brennan

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.

The Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Trinko represented a radical change from prior doctrine ensuring that antitrust laws applied in regulated industries. The change resulted from a failure to appreciate that regulation and antitrust can be complements. Regulation can boost the value of antitrust by creating incentives to refuse to deal in order to reap monopoly profit otherwise proscribed by regulation. Ironically, the essential facilities doctrine rejected by the Trinko court and the Trinko decision …

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 …

The At&T Consent Decree: In Praise Of Interconnection Only, Richard A. Epstein

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.

This article examines the consequences of the Bell consent decree of 1982. In the short run, the decree sought to end the AT&T's Corporate domination of the telecommunications network. But it did so in an overambitious way that chose to break up the basic system into constituent parts even though the preferred remedy was a more modest initiative that would have opened the network up to interconnection by rival carriers. In charting the wrong path, …

Are Regulators Forward-Looking? The Market Price Of Copper Versus The Regulated Price Of Mandatory Access To Unbundled Local Loops In Telecommunications Networks, Jerry A. Hausman, J. Gregory Sidak, Timothy J. Tardiff

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.

Around the world, since 1996, regulators have mandated that incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) offer competitors access to their network at regulated prices that reflect forward-looking cost. Regulated prices for unbundled network elements are based on total element long-run incremental cost (TELRIC), which in turn is calculated using engineering models that estimate the costs of a hypothetical carrier employing the most efficient telecommunications technology currently available and the lowest cost network configuration, given the existing …

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 …

Tercer Congreso Nacional De Organismos Públicos Autónomos, Bruno L. Costantini García

Bruno L. Costantini García

Tercer Congreso Nacional de Organismos Públicos Autónomos

"Autonomía, Reforma Legislativa y Gasto Público"

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 …

Antitrust Language Barriers: First Amendment Constraints On Defining An Antitrust Market By A Broadcast's Language, And Its Implications For Audiences, Competition, And Democracy, Catherine J.K. Sandoval

Federal Communications Law Journal

This Article explores whether the language of a broadcaster's program appropriately defines an antitrust market, consistent with First Amendment and antitrust principles. In its evaluation of the 2008 private equity buyout of Clear Channel Communications, the Department of Justice ("DOJ") defined the antitrust market by the language of the broadcast, as it had done for the 2003 merger of Univision and Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation. This Article uses social science research on Spanish and English-language radio and television to evaluate that decision. It argues that the distinct content and messages that characterize Spanish and English-language programming show that market definition is …

Forward, John S. Applegate, Robert L. Fischman

Indiana Law Journal

Scientific information has become a centralr ationalef or environmental regulation, and scientific uncertainty is viewed as a major obstacle in developing, justifying, and enforcing environmental laws and policies. In the context of environmental regulation, scientific information may be analyzed as subject to both supply and demand. A regulatory system that supplies more scientific information than it demands can operate effectively to impose protective regulation. By contrast, a system that demands more information than it supplies will face a "data gap "and will fail to accomplish its protective goals. The data gap can be addressed by applying regulatory techniques that increase …

Carl Ramey's Mass Media Unleashed, Henry Geller

Federal Communications Law Journal

Book Review: Carl R. Ramey, Mass Media Unleashed: How Washington Policy Makers Shortchanged the American Public (2007).

This superb book treats an important issue: the proper regulatory policy for broadcasting in the twenty-first century. In it, Carl Ramey critiques the Federal Communications Commission's public trustee and deregulatory market policies and suggests that to meet the dynamic market and technological changes of this new century we should, among other things, free commercial broadcasters completely from public trustee requirements and eliminate FCC enforcement of its ownership and related rules. Based on the long experience of a communications lawyer who knows so well …

Skating Toward Deregulation: Canadian Developments, Timothy J. Brennan

Federal Communications Law Journal

Canada had recently undertaken significant steps to forbear from regulating the last regulated offering in the telecommunications sector, local exchange service. Tests that Canada's telecommunications regulatory agency had imposed were overturned by order from the Canadian Cabinet Ministers. Notably, competitors to the incumbent local exchange carriers ("ILECs"), primary cable systems offering voice over Internet protocol ("VoW"') service, argued for the retention of regulation to prevent the ILECs from cutting price to customers who had switched to cable VoIP or were most likely to do so. We review here both the institutional developments leading to the forbearance decision and a number …

The “Institutional Turn” In Jurisprudence: Critique And Reconstruction., Andres Palacios Lleras

Andrés Palacios Lleras

This paper engages in a inquiry into the roles that courts play within the legal system, given that judges are interdependent interpreters of legal rules that are boundedly rational and, arguably, politically biased. Contemporary authors claim that, although these two conditions play an important role in interpretation, contemporary theories in jurisprudence have not addressed them properly. Their assessments raise legal issues that are very significant; given the fact that judges are boundedly rational and tend to display political biases, how should they interpret legal rules? Is it best for them to interpret these rules in a formalist fashion, without resorting …

The Indeterminate Side Of Constitutions As Precommitment Strategies, Andres Palacios Lleras

Andrés Palacios Lleras

This paper engages in a time-honored inquiry in American jurisprudence, an inquiry which continues to be invigorated by contemporary studies in Constitutional Law. It is an inquiry into the determinacy of the American Constitution as a legal text, taking into account that it was drafted and approved more than two hundred years ago with the purpose, arguably, to organize present and future political decision-making. Some contemporary authors claim that the discussion about the role of the Constitution is muddled, and that to acknowledge its authority does not necessarily entail a theory of constitutional interpretation. Furthermore, other authors have claimed that …

Law And Morality, Mubashshir Sarshar

Mubashshir Sarshar

No abstract provided.

Natural Justice And Its Applications In Administrative Law, Mubashshir Sarshar

Mubashshir Sarshar

No abstract provided.

Capacity Of The State And Its Subordinates, Mubashshir Sarshar

Mubashshir Sarshar

No abstract provided.

Judicial Review, Mubashshir Sarshar

Mubashshir Sarshar

No abstract provided.

Functioning Of The Law Commission Of India, Mubashshir Sarshar

Mubashshir Sarshar

No abstract provided.

J.S Mill On Liberty, Mubashshir Sarshar

Mubashshir Sarshar

No abstract provided.

Bar Council Of India, Mubashshir Sarshar

Mubashshir Sarshar

No abstract provided.

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

Publications

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 standard only reinforces such criticisms. There are, however, cases where the FCC's review of a merger - and imposition of conditions that complement the existing regulatory regime - enable the antitrust agencies to clear mergers that would otherwise pose potential objections.

The central challenge for competition policy merger review is to structure the analysis of …

El Sistema De Solución De Controversias Entre Estados, Pierino Stucchi, Luis García-Corrochano

Pierino Stucchi

No abstract provided.