Impossible trinity: A guideline to shape telecommunication policy by mediating bandwidth supply

Abstract

[[abstract]]Telecommunication policy researchers have long believed that expanding bandwidth supply and decreasing peering fee could facilitate economic activities and investment. However, the results are not always as expected. The staffs of Taiwan government hence developed an “impossible trinity” guideline to shape telecommunication policy by mediating bandwidth supply between ISPs/services. This guideline helps policy-making staff to boost certain industries/businesses or cooling other overheating ones in order to ensure economic growth and stability of the domestic market. This work explores and demonstrates how the staffs of Taiwan government apply impossible trinity to shape telecommunication policies during 2000∼2018. The contributions of this work are: (1) a hypothesis, called impossible trinity hypothesis, was made as an argument framework to harmonize the disputes between the ideas of net neutrality, fair ISP competition, and internet censorship in the TP making arena within government and market; (2) a macroeconomic TP making methodology to mediate the market development was designed; (3) the biological nature embedded in Taiwan TP making process was also discovered and differentiated in three forms, that are disruptive selection, directional selection, and convergent evolution