Law, Social Welfare, and Net Neutrality

Law, Social Welfare, and Net Neutrality

The net neutrality norm generates wealth transfers from one type of internet content provider to another. In theory, these transfers might be socially desirable, and could be justified on the basis of informational externalities similar to those that have been identified to justify the fair use doctrine in copyright law. However, in practice, the conditions that justify fair use in the copyrigh...

European Law and Regulation of Mobile Net Neutrality

"For the vast majority of consumers, the horror of getting a terribly expensive bill acts as a powerful deterrent to enter the Mobile Internet ... Users expect the mobile web to be as open and easy to use as the fixed line'"Commissioner Reding, Speech/08/70(2008) Mobile is a rapidly growing and potentially major element of the future Internet, and its environment cannot be sensibly considered i...

Net Neutrality vs. Net Neutering

Welfare Implications of Net Social Security Wealth

Real net social wealth (NSSW), the real present value of social security benefits received minus social security taxes paid, is frequently used as a direct proxy measure for the impact of a social security system on generation welfare. The present paper establishes to the contrary, for a class of overlapping generation economies, that NSSW can be simultaneously negatively correlated with welfar...

Roberts' Theorem with Neutrality: A Social Welfare Ordering Approach

We consider dominant strategy implementation in private values settings, when agents have multi-dimensional types, the set of alternatives is finite, monetary transfers are allowed, and agents have quasi-linear utilities. We show that any implementable and neutral social choice function must be a weighted welfare maximizer if the type space of every agent is an m-dimensional open interval, wher...