Abstract
After a long phase of liberalizations, privatizations, and deregulation, in telecommunications the policy pendulum has moved in the opposite direction, and the State is back in many countries. By mid-2000s, the deployment of first-generation broadband communications had reached high levels of diffusion and, thanks to market-friendly regulation, market competition has generally led consumer prices to decline. However, marked dynamics did not ensure universal service (especially in rural areas), nor the continuous upgrade of the networks, with the migration to higher capacity NGAN – two requisites increasingly demanded by downstream market developments (e-Services, cloud computing, IoT). This entry reconstructs the main market, Government and (cohesion) policy failures occurring in the sector, and the responses so far experimented in the EU, in an international perspective. In particular, it illustrates its State aid control system and analyzes the current trade-off that the new industrial policy is posing to the policy-maker in a liberalized sector.
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Matteucci, N. (2017). Public Investments: Broadband. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_689-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_689-1
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