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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Toward A Unified Theory Of Access To Local Telephone Systems, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo Dec 2008

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 …


The Enduring Lessons Of The Breakup Of At&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective, Christopher S. Yoo Dec 2008

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

All Faculty Scholarship

On April 18-19, 2008, the University of Pennsylvania Law School hosted a landmark conference on “The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective.” This conference was the first major event for Penn’s newly established Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, a research institute committed to promoting basic research into foundational frameworks that will shape the way policymakers think about technology-related issues in the future. The breakup of AT&T represents an ideal starting point for reexamining the major themes of telecommunications policy that have emerged over the past quarter century. The conference featured a keynote address by …


Rethinking Broadband Internet Access, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo Jun 2008

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, …


The Rules Of The Road Or Roadblocks On The Information Highway? Regulation And Innovation In Telecommunications, James Prieger, Daniel Heil Apr 2008

The Rules Of The Road Or Roadblocks On The Information Highway? Regulation And Innovation In Telecommunications, James Prieger, Daniel Heil

School of Public Policy Working Papers

Regulatory policy in telecommunications must balance short-term efficiency (low prices) against the firms’ incentives to innovate, which have longer reaching impacts on economic welfare. Historically, policy tended to sacrifice dynamic efficiency for the sake of competitive prices and static efficiency. In the last few decades, economists and other researchers have begun to document the large welfare costs of ignoring dynamic efficiency. We analyze the impact regulation has on innovation in a simple theoretical framework. We then turn to the empirical evidence that regulation dampens firms’ incentive to innovate in the telecommunications industry in general and the market for broadband Internet …


Siting Telecommunications Towers: Suggestions For Protecting The Public Interest, David Angerer Mar 2008

Siting Telecommunications Towers: Suggestions For Protecting The Public Interest, David Angerer

MTAS Publications: Full Publications

A city should have a strategy in place before it considers a request from a telecommunications service to erect a tower.