Communications Law Commons^™

Aclp - Comments To Ntia Re Digital Equity Act Grants Programs - May 2023, New York Law School

Reports and Resources

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Digital Communications Research And Policy, Scott Wallsten

Federal Communications Law Journal

Symposium: Essays from Time Warner Cable's Research Program on Digital Communications.

Internet Governance And Democratic Legitimacy, Oliver Sylvain

Federal Communications Law Journal

Even as the Internet goes pop, federal policymakers continue to surrender their statutory obligation to regulate communications in the first instance to extralegal nongovernmental organizations comprised of technical experts. The FCC's adjudication of a dispute concerning a major broadband service provider's network management practices is a case in point. There, in the absence of any enforceable legislative or regulatory rule, the FCC turned principally to the transmission principles of the Internet Engineering Taskforce, the preeminent nongovernmental Internet engineering standard-setting organization. This impulse to defer as a matter of course to such an organization without any legal mechanism requiring as much …

Creating Effective Broadband Network Regulation, Daniel L. Brenner

Federal Communications Law Journal

The Internet is central to the business and pastimes of Americans. Calls for increased regulation are ongoing, inevitable, and often justified. But calls for "network neutrality" or "nondiscrimination" assume with little hesitation federal agency competence to give predictable and accurate meaning to these terms and create regulations to implement them. This Article's chief contribution to Internet policy debate is to focus attention on the likelihood of successful FCC Internet regulation-a key assumption of some advocates.

The Article analyzes three characteristics that hobble the FCC, which is the likeliest federal agency to provide prescriptive rules. First, the record for the agency …

Trustworthiness As A Limitation On Network Neutrality, Aaron J. Burstein, Fred B. Schneider

Federal Communications Law Journal

The policy debate over how to govern access to broadband networks has largely ignored the objective of network trustworthiness-a set of properties (including security, survivability, and safety) that guarantee expected behavior. Instead, the terms of the network access debate have focused on whether imposing a nondiscrimination or "network neutrality" obligation on network providers is justified by the condition of competition among last-mile providers. Rules proposed by scholars and policymakers would allow network providers to deviate from network neutrality to protect network trustworthiness, but none of these proposals has explored the implications of such exceptions for either neutrality or trustworthiness.

This …

Comments Of 71 Concerned Economists: Using Procurement Auctions To Allocate Broadband Stimulus Grants, Jonathan Baker, William Baumol, Kenneth Arrow, Susan Athey, Coleman Bazelon, Timothy Brennan, Timothy Bresnahan, Jeremy Bulow, Yeon-Koo Che, Peter Cramton, Daniel Ackerberg, James Alleman, Gregory Crawford, Peter Demarzo, Gerald Faulhaber, Jeremy Fox, Ian Gale, Jacob Goeree, Brent Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein, Robert Hahn, Robert Hall, Ward Hanson, Barry Harris, Robert Harris, Janice Hauge, Jerry Hausman, Thomas Hazlett, Kenneth Hendricks, Heather Hudson, Mark Jamison, John Kagel, Alfred Kahn, Ilan Kremer, Vijay Krishna, William Lehr, Thomas Lenard, Jonathan Levin, Yuanchuan Lien, John Mayo, David Mcadams, Paul Milgrom, Roger Noll, Bruce Owen, Charles Plott, Robert Porter, Philip Reny, Michael Riordan, David Salant, Scott Savage, William Samuelson, Richard Schmalensee, Marius Schwartz, Andrzej Skrzypacz, Vernon Smith, Daniel Vincent, Joel Waldfogel, Scott Wallsten, Robert Weber, Bradley Wimmer, Glenn Woroch, Lixin Ye, John Hayes, Gregory Rosston

Congressional and Other Testimony

The signatories to this document are economists who have studied telecommunications, auctions, and competition policy. While we may disagree about the stimulus package, we believe that it is important to implement mechanisms that make stimulus spending as efficient as possible. To that end, we have come together to encourage the National Telecommunications Information Agency (NTIA) and Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to adopt auction mechanisms to allocate broadband stimulus grants.The broadband stimulus NOI asks which mechanisms NTIA and RUS should use to distribute grants and how those mechanisms address shortcomings in traditional grant and loan programs. In this note we explain …

Toward A Next Generation Regulatory Strategy, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

The FCC is now facing a set of issues that will help shape the future evolution of the Internet and the role of government in its development. In particular, the FCC is in the midst of designing a regulatory regime for broadband platforms. To do so, the FCC must decide both on the appropriate regulatory classification for such platforms and what legal rules (if any) should govern access to such platforms. This Article explains how the FCC, using its "ancillary jurisdiction" authority under Title I of the Communications Act, can develop a reactive regulatory regime that examines allegations of discriminatory …

Strategies To Promote Advanced Telecommunications Capabilities, Bob Rowe

Federal Communications Law Journal

Section 706 instructs both the FCC and state public utility commissions to promote deployment of advanced telecommunications capabilities. Much policy discussion of broadband access to date has focused on rearguing preexisting telecommunications policy debates, and has not produced significant incremental deployment of ATCs. ATC issues are much more diverse and specific than is commonly assumed, potentially requiring a menu of strategies to resolve. The "cooperative federalist" structure of the Telecommunications Act provides important context and guidance for implementing section 706. A Federal-State Joint Conference or task force would be a cooperative federalist vehicle for identifying ATC issues, developing strategies to …