Telecoms deregulation is a complicated area of the law, to say the least. Since at least the 1940’s, the overall approach by governments has been that in the case of telephony, monopolies were a good thing. This mainly stems from the inefficiencies involved in having more than one company building up the physical infrastructure (telephone lines, etc) to connect people to the system. This approach led to state-owned companies (British Telecom here in the UK) or de-facto government sponsored monopolies (AT&T in the US).
From about the late 1970’s, and really gaining traction in the 1980’s, the telecoms market has been facing increased deregulation. As mentioned in an earlier post, DR-CAFTA contains provisions requiring the deregulation of the telecoms markets of member states. These measures are largely tied to how the physical structure, the architecture, is used — generally rules on access to equipment and transparency of agreements. Others include consumer protection measures in order to prevent anti-competitive practices. They include provisions on:
- Number poratability - 13.3
- Dialing parity - 13.3
- Unbundling of services - 13.4.4
- Leased circuits - 13.4.6
- Colocation - 13.4.7
- Rights of way - 13.4.8
- Submarine cable systems - 13.5
- Independence of the regulatory body - 13.7
- Universal service obligations - 13.8
- Licence transparency - 13.9
- Frequency allocation - 13.10
- Enforcement arm of the regulatory body - 13.12
How these translate into practice into the individual jurisdictions is obviously a question highly related to the relevant legal system and governance structure. But if the end result is to decrease the ‘digital divide’ by providing better quality and lower cost services, this will have an exponential effect on IT-based businesses in the region. Not to mention the development of ‘m-commerce’.
As a final parting point, I’d also like to add that alternative physical infrastructures will also come into play, and that these have competition law and telecoms aspects. For example, wireless mesh networking could offer alternatives for high-quality broadband access using a low cost infrastructure that is generally not subject to the same level of regulation as the standard telecoms industry. VoIP, personal satellite services, other wireless technologies all feed into the decreasing dominance of the traditional telecom industry - and thus the regulatory structures used to control it.
