The Political Dynamics of Legislative Reform: Potential Drivers of the Next Communications Statute

Although most studies of major communications reform legislation focus on the merits of their substantive provisions, analyzing the political dynamics that led to the enactment of such legislation can yield important insights. An examination of the tradeoffs that led the major industry segments to support the Telecommunications Act of 1996 provides a useful illustration of the political bargain that it embodies. Application of a similar analysis to the current context identifies seven components that could form the basis for the next communications statute: universal service, pole attachments, privacy, intermediary immunity, net neutrality, spectrum policy, and antitrust reform. Determining how these components might fit together requires an assessment of areas in which industry interests overlap and diverge as well as aspects of the political environment that can make passage of reform legislation more difficult

Mapping the ICT in EU Regions: Location, Employment, Factors of Attractiveness and Economic Impact

Factual evidence suggests that ICT-led growth and ICT-producing sectors are strongly localised geographically. Given that the nature of ongoing technological change and innovation dynamics has a strong local/regional component, public policies need to be designed at this level as well. However, little is known - if anything - of the regional impact of ICT. The present study documents the regional impact of ICT by mapping the location of the ICT industry in the EU25, analysing the volume and nature of ICT employment across European regions, identifying the determinants of EU regions’ attractiveness for ICT business location and, finally, assessing the contribution of ICT investment to regional growth and convergence. The study provides evidence for the prominent role played by the Computing Services sector in recent employment and skills' changes in the ICT industry, as well as for the emergence of new regional growth poles in the EU. Departing from traditional business models, this sector of activity presents relatively low sunk costs, especially in terms of physical capital requirement while having strong innovative and skills content, opening-up new opportunities for regional development in the EU. These factors also seem to explain much of the recent trends in ICT multinationals firms' location over the past decade. The study also shows that ICT capital investment tends to promote regional economic convergence. Regional policies aiming to promote regional cohesion must therefore consider ICT diffusion as a potentially important tool for the promotion of convergence throughout the EU. Importantly, ICT diffusion should also be accompanied by other policies and, in particular, policies aiming at improving education and skills levels. The study also shows that the absence of high ICT specialisation should not be seen as a major barrier to promoting the impact of ICT on regional development.Information and Communication Technologica, European Union, Regions, Location, Employment, Qualifications Atractiveness

A History of Competition: The Impact of Antitrust on Hong Kong’s Telecommunications Markets

Hong Kong has only had cross-sector competition law since 2015, but the city’s telecommunications markets have been subject to sector-specific antitrust provisions for over two decades. The importance of nurturing an efficient, innovative, and competitive telecoms industry for Hong Kong’s economic prosperity was acknowledged already at the time the sector was liberalized in the 1990s. Yet until the late 2000s, the government vehemently opposed the adoption of competition law in virtually all other sectors of the economy. This paper examines the effectiveness of the regulatory framework set up to guarantee the protection of competition in the telecommunications sector in Hong Kong. The results of the liberalization process are certainly remarkable, and the city boasts very competitive telecoms markets. However, it is argued that the enthusiasm over the results of the liberalization process may have eclipsed important competition issues in local markets, which could have been tackled through the development of a robust antitrust policy, but which were sadly left unheeded. On the basis of the analysis of the history of (sector-specific) competition law in the telecoms sector, this Article assesses the potential of the new Competition Ordinance to address the principal threats to competition in these markets. In doing so, the paper finds that, while the new regulatory framework may be generally suitable to combat collusion, it is less clear that it will effectively combat the problems associated with the creation of market power through mergers, or the abuse of that power

Legislative and Regulatory Strategies for Providing Consumer Safeguards in a Convergent Information and Communications Marketplace

The Federal Communications Commission desires to apply a single regulatory category to services and service providers, a process the Commission can achieve when ventures concentrate on one function and offer one readily identifiable service, such as telephony. However, technological convergence, digitization and the ability of the Internet to handle many different service types within a single bitstream now make it possible for companies to offer quadruple play bundles of wireless and wireline telephony, video, and Internet access services. Following Comcast Corp. v. FCC, the FCC must rethink how to best serve the public interest and safeguard consumers. Absent a legislative remedy, the FCC has experienced great difficulty in finding ways to sanction ISP anticompetitive practices regulations within the Commission\u27s limited statutory authority. This article explains how the FCC backed itself into a corner when it sought to free the Internet of most regulatory oversight by determining that the information service classification applies to all Internet access technologies. Facing complaints about ISP anticompetitive practices, the FCC currently lacks explicit statutory authority to provide a needed remedy. The article also provides recommendations on how Congress and the FCC might recognize that convergent services, such as Internet access, combine both unregulated information service and telecommunications components in much the same way as wireless cellular telephone companies. The article recommends that in light of the ascending importance of Internet access and the lack of sustainable competition that would foster effective self-regulation, Congress should amend the Communications Act to authorize the FCC to apply limited Title II safeguards to ISPs that already wireless telephony

Earnings on the information technology roller coaster: insight from matched employer-employee data

This paper uses matched employer-employee data for the state of Georgia to examine workers’ earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector’s employment boom of the mid-1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for individual characteristics before the sector’s boom, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than those who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is no benefit to having worked in tech, likely because of the nontransferability of manufacturing experience to other industries.

The Changing Patterns of Internet Usage

The Internet unquestionably represents one of the most important technological developments in recent history. It has revolutionized the way people communicate with one another and obtain information and created an unimaginable variety of commercial and leisure activities. Interestingly, many members of the engineering community often observe that the current network is ill-suited to handle the demands that end users are placing on it. Indeed, engineering researchers often describe the network as ossified and impervious to significant architectural change. As a result, both the U.S. and the European Commission are sponsoring “clean slate” projects to study how the Internet might be designed differently if it were designed from scratch today. This Essay explores emerging trends that are transforming the way end users are using the Internet and examine their implications both for network architecture and public policy. These trends include Internet protocol video, wireless broadband, cloud computing programmable networking, and pervasive computing and sensor networks. It discusses how these changes in the way people are using the network may require the network to evolve in new directions