A 10-Point Agenda for Comprehensive Telecom Reform

Changing committee chairmanships in Congress and a leadership shakeup at the Federal Communications Commission have once again opened a window of opportunity for comprehensive telecommunications policy reform. While new faces are taking over within Congress and at the FCC, however, old issues continue to dominate the telecom policy landscape. This is largely due to the fact that, when Congress last attempted to address these matters five years ago by passing the historic Telecommunications Act of 1996, legislators intentionally avoided providing clear deregulatory objectives for the FCC and instead delegated broad and remarkably ambiguous authority to the agency. That left the most important deregulatory decisions to the FCC, and, not surprisingly, the agency did a very poor job of following through with a serious liberalization agenda. The Telecom Act, with its backward-looking focus on correcting the market problems of a bygone era, has been a failure. Instead of thoroughly clearing out the regulatory deadwood of the past, legislators and regulators have engaged in an effort to rework regulatory paradigms that where outmoded decades ago. In short, it was an analog act for an increasingly digital world. The new leadership in Congress and the FCC should adopt a fresh approach based on deregulation and free markets

Building consensus on Internet access at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)

This paper identifies and documents the main areas of discussions and 'recommendations' that were generated under the Access theme at the second Internet Governance Forum in Rio De Janeiro, November 2007. Whilst recognising that the IGF is currently viewed and operates primarily as a space for discussion, the paper finds that (specifically in the case of Access) it is also a space in which commonality of opinion occurs to the level at which 'recommendations' can be made and repeatedly asserted independently/individually in the workshops, and strategically reinforced at different levels of the IGF. The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a space for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue, set up in 2006 as a direct response to the deliberations of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The forum was created to (amongst other things) discuss public policy issues related to key elements of internet governance in order to foster the sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the internet. Its structure, function and working are addressed in paragraphs 73 to 79 of the WSIS Tunis Agenda

New public management and employee share ownership plan in Fiji’s public sector

This article provides insights into the implementation of new public management (NPM) practices in Fiji Telecom and whether the use of the employee share ownership scheme was helpful in the organisational change process. The NPM practices were influenced by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund who were the lenders to Fiji government. The adoption of NPM practices was part of a political, economic and public sector reforms introduced after 1989. The paper discusses the background and obstacles of the reform and how the employee share ownership scheme practice at a privatised Telecom Company assists employees to assimilate commercial business norms. The authors finally make recommendations for policy-makers in Fiji and other developing nations

Opportunity Recognition in High Tech and Regulatory Environment: A study of product based Indian Telecom start-ups

Opportunity recognition forms the first step of entrepreneurship. Off late entrepreneurship research has looked at opportunity recognition from varied lenses with entrepreneurial learning forming the core of most scholarly work. However opportunity recognition in high tech sectors is slightly different due to a high component of knowledge intensiveness inherent in such sectors and has been largely ignored in most work. So, we explore a specific high tech sector in the paper to understand and further the existing concepts within opportunity recognition process. We choose the Indian telecom sector as the context of the study and using an inductive case based approach arrive at conceptual combination as the dominant form of idea generation. The regulatory environment was found to acts as an enabler for the new ideas to flourish. We also bring in the idea of dynamic customization as the driving force behind the venture akin to symbiotic relationship present between organisms in the nature.

Modularity, Vertical Integration, and Open Access Policies: Towards A Convergence of Antitrust and Regulation In The Internet Age

This article aims to help regulators and commentators incorporate both Chicago School and post-Chicago School arguments in assessing whether regulation should mandate open access to information platforms. The authors outline three alternative models that the FCC could adopt to guide its regulation of information platforms in the future and facilitate a true convergence between antitrust and regulatory policy.

Sobre la reestructuración, regulación y competencia en el sector de servicios públicos: experiencia del Reino Unido y sus implicaciones para América Latina

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) Hay dos similitudes entre los programas de privatización de servicios públicos en el RU y América Latina. La privatización ha consistido principalmente en la transferencia al sector privado de compañías propiedad del Estado con posición dominante en su sector respectivo, a menudo con poderes monopólicos legales. Además, el uso extendido de una normativa basada en precios máximos en vez de la rentabilidad. Se puede sostener que una diferencia es que el RU trató de crear una política de regulación flexible estableciendo un conjunto de reguladores individuales del sector con cierta medida de independencia del gobierno con considerables poderes discrecionales.

Net neutrality discourses: comparing advocacy and regulatory arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom

Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce "Net neutrality" regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those arguments differ between the countries, and what the implications of those differences are for the Internet. Drawing on mass media, advocacy, and regulatory discourses, we find that local regulatory precedents as well as cultural factors contribute to both agenda setting and framing of Net neutrality. The differences between national discourses provide a way to understand both the structural differences between regulatory cultures and the substantive differences between policy interpretations, both of which must be reconciled for the Internet to continue to thrive as a global medium

Net neutrality discourses: comparing advocacy and regulatory arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom

Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce "Net neutrality" regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those arguments differ between the countries, and what the implications of those differences are for the Internet. Drawing on mass media, advocacy, and regulatory discourses, we find that local regulatory precedents as well as cultural factors contribute to both agenda setting and framing of Net neutrality. The differences between national discourses provide a way to understand both the structural differences between regulatory cultures and the substantive differences between policy interpretations, both of which must be reconciled for the Internet to continue to thrive as a global medium