Public v. Private Enforcement in the Electronic Communications Sector

The 2002 Common Regulatory Framework diversifies remedies to competition problems according to the market strength of telecoms providers. One set of remedies is particularly targeted at posing constraints on (pre-)existing significant market power (SMP) in the relevant market. Those remedies are provided for in the Access and Interconnection Directive and in ascending order of intrusiveness they are transparency obligation, non-discrimination obligation, accounting separation, access obligation and price control. A second set of measures are meant to apply to all telecoms providers irrespective whether they have market power or not. This set of measures is introduced by the Universal Service Directive (USD). This paper provides a comparison between sector-specific and competition law remedies and will examine the regulatory configurations in which either of the two regulatory regimes will give best results (Secion I). Having analysed the likely challenges for SMP remedies, it discusses the potential of number portability (NP) under the USD for enhancement of the state of competition (Section II). Remedies taken under a co-regulatory procedure are presented in Section III. Challenges to private enforcement of the competition rules in the telecoms sector are put forward and respective solutions to possible impediments to it are suggested in Section IV. Section V attempts to outline the predominant standard against which public and private enforcers will define harm from an antitrust violation

Internet Neutrality : Ethical Issues in the Internet Environment

This paper investigates the ethical issues surrounding the concept of Internet neutrality focusing specifically on the correlation between neutrality and fairness. Moving from an analysis of the many available definitions of Internet neutrality and the heterogeneity of the Internet infrastructure, the common assumption that a neutral Internet is also a fair Internet is challenged. It is argued that a properly neutral Internet supports undesirable situations in which few users can exhaust the majority of the available resources or in which specific types of applications and services cannot be developed or properly deployed. The solution offered to these shortcomings is based on (1) an environmental approach to the Internet, (2) the four guiding principles of Floridi’s Information Ethics and (3) a principle called ‘Information Diversity’. The paper is divided into six sections. Section 1 briefly presents the debate concerning the concepts of network and Internet neutrality. Section 2 poses a general and unifying definition of Internet neutrality based on the critical assessment of several domain-specific approaches to the problem of neutrality. Section 3 is dedicated to the analysis of the relationship between Internet neutrality and the ethical principle of fairness. Section 4 introduces Floridi’s Information Ethics, the definition of Information Diversity and an analysis of how they can be used to address the limitations of Internet neutrality. Section 5 summarises the ethics of Internet neutrality and Information Diversity defining their relationship. Section 6 reviews the arguments presented in the paper clarifying the foundational role played by Information Diversity and Information Ethics in Internet policy-making activity.Peer reviewe

Optimal access regulation with downstream competition

We analyze the setting of access prices for a bottleneck facility where the facility owner also competes in the deregulated downstream market. We consider a continuum of market structures from Cournot to Bertrand. These market structures are fully characterized by a single parameter representing the intensity of competition. We first show how the efficient component pricing rule should be modified as the downstream competitive intensity changes. We then analyse the optimal access price where a regulator trades off production efficiency and pro-competitive effects to maximize total surplus