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In this edition of Views and News, ETI is pleased to discuss the potential uses of the DoJ/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines by the FCC as the basis for its competitive analyses. We also examine wireless Internet access as a telecommunications service, and whether or not different Net Neutrality rules and other regulatory treatments should apply for wireless vs. wireline Internet access.
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New FCC interest in DoJ/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines for assessing dominant carrier market power
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For much of the past decade and across a broad range of decisions affecting telecommunications carriers, the FCC has employed a variety of subjective and predictive approaches to the measurement of competitive activity and, more directly, the extent to which competition can be relied upon as an alternative to regulation in constraining incumbent carrier prices. In many instances, the Commission has employed indirect, proxy indicia of competitive activity rather than direct, quantitative evidence. One such approach has been the use of often arbitrary “triggers” and other essentially anecdotal evidence of the “presence” of some competition, without any direct examination or quantification of actual competitive activity or whether that “presence” is sufficient to constrain the incumbent’s exercise of market power. In other cases, the FCC has relied upon its “predictive judgment” as to the impending arrival of competition even where little or none was actually in existence at the time its decision. And where such proxy or predictive evidence has been relied upon, the Commission had rarely if ever undertaken any ex post examination to determine whether the predicted competition had ever actually materialized.
There were several important developments earlier this year that bear upon this approach to competitive assessment...
Continue reading at econtech.com
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Should different regulatory treatment apply to wireline vs. wireless broadband internet access?
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While most facilities-based broadband service providers – telcos, cablecos, and wireless carriers – remain staunchly opposed to the imposition of any meaningful net neutrality rules, the wireless industry has been particularly outspoken in its efforts to assure a wireless carve-out with respect to any rules that the FCC might ultimately adopt. Wireless carriers have gone to great lengths to differentiate wireless Internet access from wireline, by engineering various hardware- and software-based linkages between basic Internet access and proprietary content and applications that they provide. These linkages, they argue, are so basic and essential to the operation and management of wireless networks as to make it impractical, if not altogether impossible, for net neutrality rules to be implemented for wireless Internet use. But do these essentially self-created technical distinctions between wireless and wireline Internet access justify the net neutrality carve-out that wireless carriers demand?
To be sure, wireline services are subject to fewer capacity constraints than wireless, which is necessarily limited to available electromagnetic spectrum. Beyond that, however, the underlying telecommunications transmission supporting both of these forms of Internet access are quite similar...
Continue reading at econtech.com
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About ETI. Founded in 1972, Economics and Technology, Inc. is a leading research and consulting firm specializing in telecommunications regulation and policy, litigation support, taxation, service procurement, and negotiation. ETI serves a wide range of telecom industry stakeholders in the US and abroad, including telecommunications carriers, attorneys and their clients, consumer advocates, state and local governments, regulatory agencies, and large corporate, institutional and government purchasers of telecom services. |
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