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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 01/02
Six Degrees of Competition: Correlating Regulation With the Telecommunications Marketplace
Robert Entman
A Report of the Fourteenth Annual Aspen Institute Conference on Telecommunications Policy
2000
Abstract
Clearly, telecommunications technologies and services have changed profoundly from the invention of the telegraph through the present day. Communications regulation, however, has progressed much less drastically. For much of the last century, the communications regulatory system— both by design and default— has maintained three types of asymmetries: geographic asymmetry, functional asymmetry, and competitive asymmetry. Today, each of those asymmetries is being called into question.
Geographic asymmetry in communications regulation occurs when laws vary across jurisdictions. It is a natural consequence of our three tiered regulatory system, where federal, state, and local regulators each have the authority to prescribe, interpret, and enforce rules. For example, a single telephone company may be subject to rather different regulatory regimes from state to state, and cable operators face different requirements from city to city.
