{"id":266,"date":"2006-02-27T18:08:37","date_gmt":"2006-02-27T23:08:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=266"},"modified":"2008-09-18T14:33:57","modified_gmt":"2008-09-18T19:33:57","slug":"telecoms-regulation-consdered-harmful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=266","title":{"rendered":"Telecoms regulation considered harmful"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it.  Here it is.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Telecoms regulation, to the extent it was <em>ever<\/em> justified, was justified on the basis of preventing or remedying market failures &mdash; such as, in particular, lack of market incentives to provide universal coverage.<\/p>\n<p>The market failures in telecoms all derive from the high fixed-capital costs of conventional wirelines.  These have two major effects: (1) incentives to provide service in rural areas are weak, because the amount of time required to amortize large fixed costs makes for poor discounted ROI; and (2) in higher-density areas, the last mile of wire is a natural monopoly\/oligopoly.<\/p>\n<p>New technologies are directly attacking this problem.  Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, IP over powerlines, and cheap fenceline cable dramatically lower the fixed capital costs of last-mile service. The main things holding these technologies back are regulatory barriers (including, notably, not enough spectrum allocated to WiFi and UWB).<\/p>\n<p>The right answer: deregulate everything, free the new technologies to go head-to-head against the wired last mile, and let the market sort it all out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it. Here it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions\/512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}