Monthly Archives: December 2012

Is it Time to End Asymmetric Regulation?

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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 Continue Reading »

A Little Kvelling About 2012…

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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 Continue Reading »

When the CLECs Jumped the Shark…

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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 Continue Reading »