Is it Time to End Asymmetric Regulation?

December 19th, 2012 | Posted by Larry Spiwak in Federal Communications Commission | IP Transition | Law and Economics | Regulation | Regulatory Reform - (Comments Off)

This week, USTelecom filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission requesting the agency to issue a declaratory ruling that incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) are no longer subject to dominant carrier regulation when providing interstate mass market and enterprise switched access services.  As the Commission begins to evaluate USTelecom’s petition, we need to keep in mind that the policy question at the heart of this proceeding is not necessarily one of de-regulation per se (although deregulation is the end objective of USTelecom’s petition), but one of regulatory symmetry.  That is, does it make sense to maintain asymmetric regulation for one select segment of the …
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A Little Kvelling About 2012…

December 14th, 2012 | Posted by Larry Spiwak in Phoenix Center - (Comments Off)

With the holidays rapidly approaching, I thought I would use our final post of the year to provide a brief summary of the Phoenix Center’s many activities in 2012.   (We will be releasing a comprehensive summary of our activities in our Annual Report after the New Year.)  As always, the Phoenix Center in 2012 was both prolific and influential. To begin, the Phoenix Center issued eight (8) scholarly papers in 2012.  The topics we covered involved a wide range of issues, including on-line intellectual property theft, spectrum exhaust, usage-based pricing, the secondary market for spectrum, the effect of regulation on investment and, perhaps most interesting, …
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When the CLECs Jumped the Shark…

December 10th, 2012 | Posted by Larry Spiwak in Federal Communications Commission | Industry Structure and Market Performance | IP Transition | Law and Economics | National Broadband Plan | Regulation | Regulatory Reform - (Comments Off)

Last month, I authored a blog entitled It’s Time to Start the Conversation on the IP Transition where I argued that we could no longer postpone the development of a cohesive regulatory paradigm to manage the complicated issue of facilitating the transition from legacy TDM networks to the more efficient IP-based networks.  This view is shared by FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai,who has long-proposed the creation of an “IP Transition Taskforce.”  And now, the chorus of supporters widens to include FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who announced today that the FCC intends to form an agency-wide “Technology Transitions Policy Task Force” that will “coordinate the Commission’s efforts …
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