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Europe's internet restrictions demonstrate to US how not to regulate

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111124_fcc_westcott_328By Martin H. Thelle and Bruno Basalisco

The United States’ future as a world economic leader may hinge on how the next Federal Communications Commission chairman approaches broadband policy.

With Tom Wheeler’s confirmation still pending, Congress should look at the European broadband experience as a cautionary tale, and it should ensure that Wheeler does not plan to follow Europe’s highly prescriptive broadband regulatory approach.

Since the late 1990s, the U.S. and the European Union have taken two very different paths on broadband policy. While the U.S. has focused on infrastructure-based competition, the EU has forced service-based competition through government regulation, with the primary objective of lowering prices.

When EU regulation was conceived in the 1990s, each state had previously run a publicly owned national telecom monopoly. EU-wide regulation aimed to ensure a level playing field across European borders to prevent member states from sheltering their national telecom incumbent from outside competition. This was the main rationale for the EU interventionist regulation at the time, but clearly this was not relevant to the U.S. context back then and is not today.

Contrary to what some have asserted, European broadband regulation is not a panacea. Moreover, Europe’s unbundling regulation — which allows multiple competing operators to offer broadband services simply by buying access to the network at a regulated price — has resulted in a telecommunications investment malaise across the European continent. While service competition can achieve low prices, the services delivered by the multitudes of providers are only as good as the single shared infrastructure, limiting performance.

As with any communications service, investment in infrastructure is needed to provide consumers with the quality services they demand. A decade after unbundling in Europe, per capita investment in telecommunications infrastructure now lags the US by more than 50%.

The problem with the European unbundling regulation is that it pitted short-term consumer benefits, such as low prices, against the long-run benefits from capital investment and innovation. Unfortunately, regulators often sacrificed the long-term interest by forcing an infrastructure owner to share its physical wires with competing operators at a cheap rate. Thus, the regulated company never had a strong incentive to invest in new infrastructure technologies — a move that would considerably benefit the competing operators using its infrastructure.

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After all, why would one infrastructure provider want to subsidize operations for all of its competitors? And why would those competitors wish to invest to deploy their own wires instead of using the regulated ones? Therefore, regulation curtailed all players’ incentives to invest in new infrastructure technologies.

In contrast, US policies gave the companies that built and maintained the wires control over the broadband Internet delivered through their networks. This gave companies incentive to invest in new technologies and infrastructure, resulting in infrastructure-based competition between broadband providers. Consequently, in 2011 and 2012, more miles of fiber were installed in the U.S. than Europe-wide.

These investments in internet infrastructure are critically important to the economy as a whole. By encouraging broadband providers to invest more than $1.2 trillion since 1996, the US has grown its labor productivity, a key economic indicator that measures efficiency in producing goods and services. Had the U.S. followed the EU’s slower investment pace in information technology since the late 1990s, US labour productivity would have been 25-30% percent lower than it is today.

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EU Reporter publishes articles from a variety of outside sources which express a wide range of viewpoints. The positions taken in these articles are not necessarily those of EU Reporter.

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