Post-Liberalization Challenges in Telecommunications: Balancing Antitrust and Sector-Specific Regulation; Tentative Lessons from the Experiences of the United States, New Zealand, Chile, and Australia

Abstract

This paper seeks to shed some light both on how economy-wide and infrastructure or sector-specific components of the regulatory framework should be designed and on what the respective roles of such components should be to maximize the efficiency of economic regulation in telecommunications. It attempts to derive some lessons from the experience of four countries - the United States, New Zealand, Chile, and Australia - which have chosen to put different emphasis and given different roles to those different elements of the regulatory framework. Each of the four country model is evaluated on its ability to achieve key objectives of telecommunications regulation, which are presented in the following section. Then, the paper compares the experiences of the four countries in order to draw lessons on how economy-wide and infrastructure or sector-specific rules and institutions should de designed to ensure the maximum efficiency of the regulatory framework applicable to telecommunications.