Innovation Policy Post

The Brookings Institute held a panel discussion Wednesday on “Fostering Internet Competition” to highlight a new Brookings paper “How to Maintain a Competitive Internet.” Darrell West, who moderated the discussion, wrote that by 2016 analysts estimate the digital economy will amount to $4.2 trillion among G-20 nations – nearly double the $2.3 trillion for 2010.

At the beginning of this month the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its judgment on the long-awaited ‘Premier League rights’ case. The legal dispute arose in the UK involving exclusive broadcasting licenses for the live transmission of Premier League soccer games that prohibit the use of decoder cards bought from foreign broadcasters. The FA Premier League (FAPL), the licensor of Premier League live matches, licenses these transmission rights on a country-by-country basis under terms and conditions that vary widely across the EU. By engaging in simple price arbitrage some pubs obtained cheaper decoder cards from abroad circumventing the exclusive licensing structure operational on UK territory. 

Top experts on search engines told Capitol Hill staffers at an event organized by CCIA Tuesday that there is healthy competition among search engines.

Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, a website that reports on the online search market, said that it has never been unusual for businesses or advertisers to complain about where they come up in search results. What is new here he said is that businesses are arguing that their low rankings are an antitrust issue for the government to fix. 

A study performed by University of California at Irvine professor of economics David Neumark and released today confirms that AT&T's proposed take-over of T-Mobile, if approved, would cost the American economy tens-of-thousands of jobs.  The study shows that AT&T would shed jobs to eliminate redundancy and overlap in the merged company and reduce overall network investment.  Professor Neumark's work debunks the unsubstantiated claims AT&T has made to sell the merger to policymakers and regulators - namely that acquiring T-Mobile will lead to an increase in jobs.

In January 2005, the FCC opened a rulemaking docket to the FCC’s regulation of the “special access” rates that businesses and millions of customers pay to the largest telephone companies for broadband connections to the Internet.  Despite overwhelming evidence of wildly excessive pricing (profit margins for companies that control high-capacity broadband lines are over 100%), the FCC has failed to take action.