| NOTAS: | "Over the last few years, there has been a step change in digital communications, which have had a dramatic effect on the way people live their lives and conduct business. Broadband technologies are becoming the base upon which people and IT systems are enabled to communicate electronically ubiquitously, rapidly and cheaply, resulting in a high level of innovation and a wide range of economic and social benefits. Regulation is fundamental to the realisation of the networked economy, as it plays a central role in setting a vision for the evolution of the telecoms market including, crucially, the types of market structure that will emerge. This is particularly the case with broadband telecoms, as first, in these early stages of deployment, the market needs structures that encourage the widest availability of cheap broadband as rapidly as possible, and second, market structures determine the extent of innovation within the telecoms industry itself, for example in applications and services, a key ingredient in achieving the networked economy. As the EU and USA consider new regulatory approaches to electronic communications, this report explains what the new legislation means for the evolution of the telecoms industry, both now and in the future. The report aims to question some aspects of conventional regulatory approaches, on the grounds that they risk losing some of the full benefits of the networked economy, and considers the big regulatory challenges that lie ahead." |
