Termination charges toward newer entrants are often set asymmetrically to exceed efficient costs for telephony traffic. Such practices are said to be beneficial to consumers as well as providing competition a “leg-up”. However claims of consumer benefit are dubious at best, while infant industry arguments are no more likely to apply to telecommunications than they apply anywhere else. Appropriate forms of termination regulation are then considered.
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[ Asymmetric termination charges to support small networks ]
Few issues have been as controversial in Australia as the setting of access prices in telecommunications. This paper provides a survey of the Australian experience in that regard.
Few issues have been as controversial in recent years as telecommunications. The widely publicised dispute between Telstra and the previous government received almost daily coverage in the media; with the recent change of government, the future of Australia’s telecommunications policy is under close scrutiny.
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Telecommunications: Competition Regulation and Communication via the Internet
The issue of broadband internet access is an important one for public policy makers in Australia and elsewhere.
In an address to the National Press Club in Canberra, Henry Ergas explored the benefits and ways of pursuing a free trade agreement between the United States and Australia.
New Part XIB of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) (the TPA) gives the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (the ACCC) new powers to control anti-competitive conduct by carriers and carriage service providers. In using these powers, and specifically when issuing a Competition Notice1 or making a tariff filing direction, the ACCC will have to form a view about the telecommunications markets in which these industry participants operate.
Normatively, regulation can be viewed as an implicit or explicit contract between the regulatory authority, consumers and the regulated supplier(s) The essence of this contract is that the authority, acting as a consumer agent, commits to setting prices on a basis which recoups the long-run costs of efficient supply, where efficient supply is defined with reference to that which would prevail were the market at issue contestable.
The reform of telecommunications regulations began at virtually the same time in New Zealand and Australia. In New Zealand, the first serious steps were taken in 1986 with the commissioning by the Government of the Mason-Morris report into the operations of the Post Office In Australia, the Government initiated a review of telecommunications arrangements some eight months later Close geographical proximity, the near simultaneity of the processes, and the fact that at the time both countries had Labor Governments did not, however, mean that similar outcomes eventuated.
This paper is structured around six propositions. These are: Historically, international telecommunications services have been provided cooperatively by national telecommunications entities each supplying service on a monopoly basis within its national territory.
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