Description
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Telecoms Trade War: The United States the European Union and the World Trade Organisation by Mark Naftel Lawrence J. Spiwak
If one were to believe the politicians and pundits in the trade pressthe world is in midst of a telecoms revolution resulting from (the) deregulation and new competitive opportunities represented by the 1997 World Trade Organisation Agreement on Basic Telecommunications Services. This may be true. Unfortunately however the actions of many regulators and industry participants more accurately reveal not a telecoms revolution but instead a growing telecoms trade war that is dangerously close to spiralling out of hand. In this book Naftel and Spiwak review U.S. and European competition and regulatory initiatives post-WTO and provide both a useful roadmap to todays U.S. EU and WTO telecoms regulation and an examination of various case studies to illustrate their points. In so doing the authors discover unfortunately the sad reality that despite the political rhetoric regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have eschewed innovative and indeed productive solutions to create a market structure conducive to long-term competitive rivalry.Instead the authors demonstrate that current policies reveal a growing cynicism towards the maximisation of consumer welfare that will be difficult - if not outright impossible- to remove.show more