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Empires of Entertainmentintegrates legal, regulatory, industrial, and political histories to chronicle the dramatic transformation within the media between 1980 and 1996. As film, broadcast, and cable grew from fundamentally separate industries to interconnected, synergistic components of global media conglomerates, the concepts of vertical and horizontal integration were redesigned. The parameters and boundaries of market concentration, consolidation, and government scrutiny began to shift as America's politics changed under the Reagan administration. Through the use of case studies that highlight key moments in this transformation, Jennifer Holt explores the politics of deregulation, the reinterpretation of antitrust law, and lasting modifications in the media landscape. Holt skillfully expands the conventional models and boundaries of media history. A fundamental part of her argument is that these media industries have been intertwined for decades and, as such, cannot be considered separately. Instead, film, cable and broadcast must be understood in relation to one another, as critical components of a common history.Empires of Entertainmentis a unique account of deregulation and its impact on political economy, industrial strategies, and media culture at the end of the twentieth century.

This book combines a detailed, sector-specific study of comparative telecommunications regimes set in the context of the EC, with an extensive historical and empirical analysis of individual policy management and change as experienced by three diverse regulatory cultures, namely, Britain, the Netherlands and France. By adopting a comprehensive analytical framework based on far-reaching literature, the author explores a wide-range of theories, addressing key issues at the forefront of contemporary political and academic debate as: Do nation states matter in the globalizing telecommunications industry? Does the common challenge of techno-global telecommunications restructuring elicit different national responses? What is the significance of a single-speed or multi-speed Europe in implementing telecommunications governance regimes?

Over the past ten years, private-sector-led growth has revolutionized access to telecommunications. Every region of the developing world benefitted in terms of investment and rollout. This revolution would have been impossible without government reform and oversight. Advanced information and communication infrastructure (ICI) are increasingly important to doing business in a globalizing world. Governments, enterprises, civil society, workers, and poor populations in the developing countries need more affordable access. This report proposes strategies that governments can carry out to attract private investment and ensure the continued evolution and spread of information and communication infrastructure. These strategies encompass more than sector policy alone, for investment decisions are based on a wide range of factors including, for example, the roles played by financial sector development and the broader investment environment. The strategies also include potential public sector investments that can catalyze ICI rollout in subsectors where the private sector is not prepared to intervene on its own.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act was an attempt to increase competition among telecommunications providers in the United States by reducing regulatory barriers to market entry. This competition was expected to drive innovation in the telecommunications sector and reap economic benefits for both American consumers and telecommunications providers. The legislation, however, had a markedly different impact. While many of the more aggressive providers enjoyed sharp short-term rises in stock market values, they soon faced sudden collapse, leaving consumers with little or no long-term benefit. InCompetition and Chaos, Robert W. Crandall analyzes the impact of the 1996 act on economic welfare in the United States and how the act and its antecedents affected the major telecommunications providers. He argues that the act was far too stringent, inviting the Federal Communications Commission and state regulators to micromanage competitive entry into local telecommunications markets. Combined with the bursting of the dot.com and telecom stock market bubbles, this aggressive policy invited new and existing firms to invest billions of dollars unwisely, leading to the 2001-02 collapse of equity values throughout the sector. New entrants into the market invested more than $50 billion in unproductive assets that were quickly wiped out through massive failures. The 1996 act allowed the independent long-distance companies, such as MCI and AT& T, to live a few years longer. But today they are a threatened species, caught in a downward spiral of declining prices and substantial losses. The industry is preparing for an intense battle for market share among three sets of carriers: the wireless companies, the local telephone carriers, and the cable television businesses. Each has its own particular advantage in one of the three major segments of the market -voice, data, and video -but none is assured a clear path to dominance. Although the telecom stock market collapse is now history and the survivors are investing once again, Crandall concludes that the regulators have failed to adapt to the chaos to which they contributed.

Over the last several years, the value of stocks in both the airline and the telecommunications industries have dropped catastrophically. Since these industries were among the most important-and most visible-to have been unleashed from regulation in recent decades (albeit in widely differing degree), their difficulties have raised the question of whether their deregulation should be reconsidered or even reversed. Alfred E. Kahn, one of the foremost authorities on deregulation, argues in this book that every passing year demonstrates the superiority of the road chosen for the airlines. He contrasts the financial meltdowns of both the airline and telecommunications industries with others taking place at the same time, particularly in technology-related stocks and \"dot.coms,\" pointing out that these sectors were also relatively free of direct economic regulation. Their experience provides a useful counter to the natural tendency to blame all the woes of aviation and telecommunications on government policy. This book provides a valuable and accessible guide to unraveling the complex world of network deregulation. It will serve as a reference point for practioners and policymakers, as well as an important introduction for the general public.

Interconnection, equal access, unbundling, and industry structure are four key determinants of facilities-based competition in telecommunications. Using these building blocks, this paper analyzes the differences in telecommunications regulatory regimes in Australia, Chile, Guatemala, and New Zealand, assessing the effect on competition and consumer welfare. Some regulation is necessary as incumbents can prolong their market power after demonopolization by exploiting positive externalities inherent to telecommunications networks. The authors emphasize the superiority of market mechanisms over traditional regulatory processes to achieve efficient transactions among operators. Such market mechanisms need clear rules and credible enforcement.

This book analyses telecommunications markets from early to mature competition, filling the gap between the existing economic literature on competition and the real-life application of theory to policy. Paul De Bijl and Martin Peitz focus on both the transitory and the persistent asymmetries between telephone companies, investigating the extent to which access price and retail price regulation stimulate both short- and long-term competition. They explore and compare various settings, such as non-linear versus linear pricing, facilities-based versus unbundling-based or carrier-select-based competition, non-segmented versus segmented markets. On the basis of their analysis, De Bijl and Peitz then formulate guidelines for policy. This book is a valuable resource for academics, regulators and telecommunications professionals. It is accompanied by simulation programs devised by the authors both to establish and to illustrate their results.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act was an attempt to increase competition among telecommunications providers in the United States by reducing regulatory barriers to market entry. This competition was expected to drive innovation in the telecommunications sector and reap economic benefits for both American consumers and telecommunications providers. The legislation, however, had a markedly different impact. While many of the more aggressive providers enjoyed sharp short-term rises in stock market values, they soon faced sudden collapse, leaving consumers with little or no long-term benefit. In Competition and Chaos, Robert W. Crandall analyzes the impact of the 1996 act on economic welfare in the United States and how the act and its antecedents affected the major telecommunications providers. He argues that the act was far too stringent, inviting the Federal Communications Commission and state regulators to micromanage competitive entry into local telecommunications markets. Combined with the bursting of the dot.com and telecom stock market bubbles, this aggressive policy invited new and existing firms to invest billions of dollars unwisely, leading to the 2001-02 collapse of equity values throughout the sector. New entrants into the market invested more than 50 billion in unproductive assets that were quickly wiped out through massive failures. The 1996 act allowed the independent long-distance companies, such as MCI and AT&T, to live a few years longer. But today they are a threatened species, caught in a downward spiral of declining prices and substantial losses. The industry is preparing for an intense battle for market share among three sets of carriers: the wireless companies, the local telephone carriers, and the cable television businesses. Each has its own particular advantage in one of the three major segments of the market--voice, data, and video--but none is assured a clear path to dominance. Although the telecom stock market collapse i.

From Fred Kahn's writings and experiences as a telecommunications regulator and commenter, we draw the following conclusions: prices must be informed by costs; costs are actual incremental costs; costs and prices are an outcome of a Schumpeterian competitive process, not the starting point; excluding incumbents from markets is fundamentally anticompetitive; and a regulatory transition to deregulation entails propensities to micromanage the process to generate preferred outcomes, visible competitors and expedient price reductions. And most important, where effective competition takes place among platforms characterized by sunk investment—land-line telephony, cable and wireless —traditional regulation is unnecessary and likely to be anticompetitive.