Law And Regulation Of Common Carriers In The Communications Industry by Daniel L Brenner

Author:Daniel L Brenner [Brenner, Daniel L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429967856
Google: RQDFDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-03-14T03:36:38+00:00

B. Transmission of Information and Catch-All Restriction

At the same time, the Court is ordering the removal of two other restrictions where this will yield significant benefits without serious risk of harm to competition.

First. The wide-ranging yet diffuse "catch-all" restriction on the entry of the Regional Companies into all non-telecommunications markets is being repealed outright. Experience has shown that no substantial purpose is being served by requiring the Regional Companies to petition the Court whenever they wish to enter a business having no direct relationship to telecommunications, and where the risk of anticompetitive activity is relatively small. Indeed, the Court has to date granted over 160 "waivers" of this restriction and refused none. Although some danger of improper cross-subsidization remains, the benefits from a removal of this restriction outweigh that danger in this circumstance. Elimination of the restriction will also have the beneficial effect of permitting the Regional Companies hereafter to make decisions with respect to substantial segments of their business without day-to-day involvement or supervision by the Court.

Second. One of the core restrictions of the decree prohibits the Regional Companies from providing information services. The Court is retaining that restriction insofar as it involves the generation of information content, for the same reason that it is retaining the other core restrictions. If the Regional Companies had the authority to sell information in competition with other providers of these services, their control of the networks essential to the distribution of that information would give them the same ability to discriminate against competitors as they have with regard to interexchange services and the manufacture of telecommunications equipment.

That does not mean, however, that the public must be deprived of the revolutionary changes that are possible if information, instead of being transmitted only by current methods,338 can also be made available to vast numbers of consumers instantaneously by means of the telephone network. Other nations—France in particular, but also Japan and Great Britain—have experimented with such an innovative use of the telephone system, with some considerable success. The French Teletel system—which may for present purposes serve as a rough guide in this regard—has some three million subscribers and is used to supply to these subscribers immediate access to about 4,000 independent services supplying specific information upon request in such fields as banking and brokerage, shopping (availability and price), travel (schedules and reservations), tickets to entertainment and sporting events, employment availability, language instruction, governmental notices, schedule of meetings of associations, reprints of newspaper and magazine articles, and others.

The Court has concluded that the apparently competing interests—preven-tion of monopolization of information services versus broad availability of such services to the public—can be reconciled by severing for decree purposes the generation of information content (which will remain prohibited to the Regional Companies) from the transmission of information services (which the Regional Companies will be allowed to provide).

The Court will accordingly lift so much of the information services restriction as prevents the Regional Companies from constructing and operating a sophisticated network infrastructure that will make possible the transmission,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.