Revisiting the Regulatory Status of Broadband Internet Access: A Policy Framework for Net Neutrality and an Open Competitive Internet

A decade of broadband access deregulation has landed the FCC at a legal deadend. After the D.C. Circuit\u27s Comcast decision, the FCC finds itself unable to enforce its net neutrality goals. To reassert its jurisdiction over net neutrality, the FCC proposes to reclassify broadband Internet access as a Title II telecommunications service while continuing to forbear from most other facets of common carrier regulation. The FCC\u27s current dilemma results from an unfortunate combination of unverified predictive judgments associating deregulation with investment; overly optimistic assessments of competition in the consumer broadband market; the abandonment of the bright line between transmission and content; and elimination of unbundling requirements for broadband services. The FCC needs now to revisit-and revise-the factual, legal and policy judgments that have brought it to the current situation. Reclassification is factually and legally the proper regulatory course, but its benefits would be seriously undermined by broad presumptive forbearance. Last mile broadband Internet access offered by incumbent local exchange carriers and cable companies is unambiguously pure transmission, i.e., telecommunications service. Facilities-based Internet access providers should be required to offer downstream rivals equivalent last-mile broadband access as a wholesale telecommunications service on a nondiscriminatory basis; under this framework, telcos and cable companies could continue offering broadband bundled with content and applications as competitive, non-regulated information services. Given the demonstrated ability of facilities-based carriers to use their control of bottleneck last mile access to discriminate against downstream rivals, there can be no justification for the FCC to forbear from applying most Title II obligations to broadband access providers. Combining these two threads, the authors conclude that by restoring competitors\u27 ability to purchase basic broadband access as a platform for their own retail Internet access entry, the FCC has the opportunity to create more competition, with less explicit net neutrality regulation, than by reclassification alone

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The electronic communications policy of the European Union

This book has endeavoured to analyse how the European Union's Electronic Communications Policy has evolved over more than thirty years, since the first proposals were put forward in 1977 to the present time, when the second review launched in 2005 has been finalised. During the last three decades, electronic communications have become increasingly more important for the economic and social development of the European Union, which justifies and explains the enthusiasm with which the Community Institutions have set about developing this Policy. Leaving aside the shortcomings and inadequacies of the liberalisation process experienced in the European Union-e.g., the absence of a true Electronic Communications Policy of the European Union to provide rigour to what are now twenty-seven different national policies or the constant confrontation between Member states sovereignty and EU supranationality, among other deficiencies that the authors point out in their conclusions-the fact is that the constant evolution of the sector, in the wake of powerful technological and economic changes, greatly hampers-and maybe even calls into question-the achievement of the objectives that were set at the time and that the new Digital Agenda renews and expands today. These goals-among which, the creation of a single internal market, stimulating investment in infrastructure and increasing competition-are in a sense contradictory, which makes it difficult the design and implementation of appropriate regulatory policies in an environment that is also subject to constant change.Alabau Muñoz, AB.; Guijarro Coloma, LA. (2011). The electronic communications policy of the European Union. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/932