Takings, Commons and Associations: Why the Telecommunication Act of 1996 Misfired
نویسنده
چکیده
There is widespread agreement today on all sides of the telecommunications wars that something is deeply flawed with the design or implementation (or both) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The immediate grounds for this judgment lie in the short term wreckage that has come in wake of its passage. The ostensible end of the 1996 Act was the introduction of competition into an industry that has long been dominated by the local exchange carriers (LECs), which operated under a statutory monopoly for their respective territories. But the term “competition” carries with it a distinct connotation in telecommunications. As a network industry, no free-standing entity can enter the market and win away customers from an incumbent by the simple expedient of offering a better product at a lower price. Some form of cooperation is strictly necessary so that customers of the various competitors on the telecommunications grid are able to forge connections with each other. The near-decade long battle has been over the terms and conditions under which the needed interaction between rival carriers takes place. A purely competitive market needs no central agency to set prices for either inputs or outputs. In contrast, “competition” in a network industry requires at least one centralized decisionmaker to allow the various entities to compete for customers on one side of their business while coordinating their operations on the other. The choice of institutional mechanism for achieving this result is absolutely critical to the overall competitive effort once the decision has been made to abandon the old monopolistic model subject to rate regulation. Here there are two, and only two, possible ways in which the government regulation can procure the internal infrastructure
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