Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Response To Questions In The First White Paper, 'Modernizing The Communications Act', Randolph J. May, Richard A. Epstein, Justin (Gus) Hurwitz, Daniel Lyons, James B. Speeta, Christopher S. Yoo

Daniel Lyons

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has begun a process to review and update the Communications Act of 1934, last revised in any material way in 1996. As the Committee begins the review process, this paper responds to questions posed by the Committee that all relate, in fundamental ways, to the question: "What should a modern Communications Act look like?" The Response advocates a "clean slate" approach under which the regulatory silos that characterize the current statute would be eliminated, along with almost all of the ubiquitous 'public interest' delegation of authority found throughout the Communications Act. The replacement regime …

Residential And Business Broadband Prices Part 1: An Empirical Analysis Of Metering And Other Price Determinants, Scott J. Wallsten, James Riso

Scott J. Wallsten

For this project, we assemble a new dataset consisting of more than 25,000 residential and business broadband plans from all OECD countries from 2007–2009. We explore three issues: the relationship between plan components—such as metering—and consumer prices, price changes over time, and how broadband prices vary across countries.

This paper, part 1 of the project, discusses pricing for broadband plans and, specifically, the relationship between plan components and pricing. We find that residential broadband plans with data caps—plans in which consumers pay a base price for a set amount of data—cost less than plans with unlimited data, other things being …