A “Public Infrastructure” Perspective on Special Access

15 Apr 2016

A “Public Infrastructure” Perspective on Special Access

As I discussed in an earlier post, the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) recently released a paper by its Director of Research, Mark Cooper, which made the case that the FCC’s decision to deregulate special access in 1999 was premature and has resulted in large-scale economic harm, including an estimated $150 billion over the past five years. Cooper’s analysis focused on two elements of harm: 1) the direct cost associated with non-competitive excess-profit-extracting pricing and; 2) the indirect economic costs associated with this pricing regime. As it turns out, a few days after Cooper presented an overview of his analysis at […]

07 Apr 2016

BTOP’s Fiber Investment, Social Value & the Special Access Market

During the past few days I’ve been: 1) reviewing the BTOP program evaluation study’s final report prepared in 2014 by ASR Analytics and; 2) doing some homework aimed at better understanding issues related to the FCC’s pending special access study and proceeding. The former relates to a pending Quello Center research project, while the latter was prompted by release of a paper written by Mark Cooper, Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America (CFA). Cooper presented the paper, entitled “The Special Problem of Special Access: Consumer Overcharges and Telephone Company Excess Profits,” at an April 5 event sponsored by […]

09 Aug 2015

Using ICT to Develop Infrastructure Systems for the “Digital Anthropocene”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the design and management of society’s core infrastructure systems (which I define broadly to include things like healthcare, education, housing and “money”) in an era marked by several important trends (for reasons suggested below, I refer to this as the “digital anthropocene”): substantial (and currently destructive) impacts of human activities on natural systems, a planetary phase referred to as the Anthropocene; continued and arguably mounting evidence that the status-quo dynamics within our dominant political and economic systems are aggravating rather than reducing inequalities in wealth and related factors; the dramatic expansion in scope, content […]

12 Feb 2015

Community Fiber Networks: Bringing Competition and World-Class Infrastructure to American Cities

In the following video, President Obama announced several steps his Administration is taking to encourage municipally-owned broadband networks, as well as the rationale for taking them. A few weeks after the president’s January 14 speech, the FCC announced it would be voting on a similar approach to municipal broadband at its February 26 meeting, where it will also vote on a proposal to classify broadband access as a Title II common carrier. Since community broadband is a topic I hope to write about here in the future, and the Commission’s meeting is only two weeks away, I thought I’d share some initial […]

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