Search

IN 'FACING THE GLOBAL Competitiveness Challenge' (Issues, Summer 2005), Kent H. Hughes persuasively argues that future productivity and economic growth depend on a society's success at innovation and outlines a […]

In the paper several reasons will be investigated why there is only partial deregulation in Germany and extensive deregulation in the U.S. Purely economic reasons such as economies of scale are shown to be of little help for understanding telecommunications policy in Germany as compared to the U.S. As an alternative, a politico-economic approach is presented. It is shown that institutional differences can help to understand the differences in deregulatory policy. In Germany, decisions on telecommunications deregulation are centralized on the federal level, whereas they are distributed on the federal and state level in the U.S. As consequence, a different interest group representation is prevailing in each country promoting deregulation in the U.S. and impeding deregulation in Germany. It is shown that the obstacles to deregulation in Germany might be overcome through an explicit compensation scheme embodying an entry tax on the one hand a price subsidy on the other.

A study was conducted to investigate how telecommunications policy makers and regulators in the European Union, Japan, the US and Singapore have managed challenges brought about by Internet telephony. Internet telephony was characterized as an archetype of convergence growth in the communications industry. Results indicated that the countries' policies on Internet telephony correlated with current regulatory frameworks designed for basic communications services. Findings also showed a number of uncertainties associated with convergence in the industry.

The relationship existing between telecommunications policy and communication theory is examined to determine the conflicting discussions about liberalization and democratization goals in present telecommunication policies. The objective is to present how these conflicts in policy goals have profound historical origins. Two distinct communication models were also used to link conceptually liberalization and democratization to illustrate how these models can be unified to serve as a basis for a telecommunications policy that is fully democratized within a liberalized global economy.

What if a devastating earthquake, regional flood, or power blackout caused your local communications infrastructure to be severely compromised? How would you mobilize your emergency response team? How would you [...]

US VP Al Gore has proposed certain administrative regulations to introduce legislative reforms in the communications act to commercially develop the National Information Infrastructure (NII). The most significant proposal was the symmetrical integration of 'alternative regulatory regime' and elimination of competition in long-distance and local transmission operations. Gore's plans propose to interconnect all classrooms, libraries, hospitals and clinics by 2000.