By Rachel Goldfarb, originally published on Next New Deal
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Nobel-Winning Message for the FCC (Bloomberg View)
Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford asks whether Jean Tirole’s new Nobel Prize in Economics might convince the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider his work on regulating communications utilities. By ignoring his work, she says the FCC has brought on the highly concentrated monopolies of the U.S.’s current telecommunications infrastructure.
More than a decade ago, federal policy makers turned their backs on Tirole’s sensible assessments of private communications utilities — and with disastrous results.
Tirole’s insight was that any company controlling physical lines into homes and businesses, left to its own devices, would act as a natural monopoly, extracting tribute from every other business and customer that depends on communications capacity. To constrain that power, regulators might need to separate wholesale and retail communications-access services, and require interconnection with other networks.
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