Despite their importance in the global organization and economy of internet networks, content delivery networks (CDNs) remain quite unfamiliar outside professional circles. However, they have a key role for a smooth functioning of the distribution of digital contents. This paper assesses the importance of these new powerful economic actors of the internet, identify the technical and economic integration dynamics that underlie their development, and clarify some of the characteristics of their business models with a focus on interconnection.
Especially in Western and Northern Europe public broadcasters play an important cultural, but also economic role reaching a vast majority of the population and in so doing co-shaping national identities, contributing to informed citizenship and, at the same time, competing for the scarce time of media users. As public service media is a part of Member States' cultural policy toolkits, the competencies of the European Commission in this domain are limited to internal market and competition policies. Looking at public service media from this perspective is at times conflictuous since the presence of public broadcasters might be seen as an anomaly to a free and competitive internal market. This article analyzes how the European Commission deals with public service media in its internal market and competition policies. Its main underlying question is whether the European Commission has been successful in taking into account both economic and cultural aspects relevant to media policy or whether one of these has been superior to the other. Assuming the latter is indeed the case, the axis of the analysis is not only on uncovering friction between diverging policy goals, but equally on suggesting where space for a more balanced approach, for example, in light of the review of the Audiovisual Media Services directive, can be found. Findings are based on a qualitative document analysis. The main argument is that whereas the European Commission used to be somewhat hostile towards public service media as a market distortion, public broadcasters might turn out to be important in terms of realizing both the economic and cultural aspects of European integration. A re-balancing of policies through, for example, the inclusion of public service media's special status in the European Union in the renewed Audiovisual Media Services directive is therefore advisable.
New players emerge in the audiovisual industry and offer unprecedented solutions for aggregating and distributing content. New entrants, especially social networks, have been the engines of these changes toward multitasking, multi-screening behaviours. The way of accessing and interacting with content has changed. Over the last three decades, the European Commission has been watching carefully the evolution of the media and content industries with the goal to foster growth and innovation of digital content services in the European Union, while at the same time protecting consumers in a harmonised fashion.The paper contrasts the global trends of the market, the features of the dual EU audiovisual markets with some of the recent proposals of the European Commission in the backdrop of its numerous initiatives of the last decades.
The article considers the key media policy objective of enhancing cultural diversity and explores one of the possible paths towards it in the digital media space – namely, by addressing the new intermediaries that have an increasingly critical role in contemporary media experiences. It sketches some particular problems that policy-makers need to take into account, such as tailored content consumption, as well as some ways to solve them, such as through content curation in the public interest.
The mobile industries went through many (r)evolutions that increased their performance, triggered new usages and contributed to the vast popularity of mobile handsets. Some evolutions were pushed by the regulators, some were technological, some were marketing-related and others were business model-related. Our paper proposes an analysis of the latter through the spectacular example of the entry of Apple in the mobile industry in 2007. We show how Apple's business model disrupted the whole architecture and design of the mobile industry and stimulated the rise of a new cycle of innovations.
How can innovation and competition be sustained in closed tight oligopolistic market structures? This question will be crucial in the next years for an appropriate regulation of mobile markets. The regulatory framework era of the postulate of infrastructure based competition seems behind us. It is time now to re-open the regulatory tool box to renew a service based competition approach with good incentives for all players: the incumbents with their own mobile infrastructure and potential entrants with innovative propositions for services in the emergent era of Internet of Things. This paper proposes to revisit the concept of the of and to apply this approach to the mobile specific context where operators need an access to frequencies to maintain and develop their businesses. Our radio spectrum ladder of investment is structured by six rungs. Each of them supposes an appropriate technical and pricing access to the operators' networks infrastructure. Opening access to the mobile networks will be sensitive. A general scheme based on incentives for the network operators rather than on obligations and constraints is certainly more appropriate. Proposals are suggested in this article to pursue this objective.
The aim of the paper is to better understand of the processes of standardization relating to 5G. This includes an understanding of how 5G can be conceptualized. It also includes knowledge on where the processes of standardization take place. The paper introduces two different analytical approaches to the analysis of telecom standardization processes: boundary objects and standards wars. The boundary objects approach, new in the field of analyses of telecom standardization processes, focuses on the fact that cooperation between various stakeholders can take place without full consensus on the directions and perspectives of the cooperative work. The standards wars approach puts emphasis on the conflictual relationships between different camps regarding the promotion of standards and products or systems. Concerning the upstarting processes of standardization of 5G, it seems that 5G standardization resembles a boundary object more than standards war. However, in order to better understand standardization processes, we propose a combination of, or the use of, both of the two frameworks. The boundary objects framework will contribute with an understanding of the non-conflictual aspects of the standardization processes, while theories that are part of the concept of standards wars will be applicable for conceptualizing the more confrontational aspects.
The paper introduces an overview of the issue of data. It provides some guestimates of its size (volume, market, features), and investigates the real meaning of the phenomenon based on case studies from big data pioneers and involved industries. It takes a look at the main drivers, and at some likely outputs. The paper identifies some of the tensions and issues brought by this new growth industry and reviews the policies needed to face the challenges ahead.
Network performance measurements from OECD countries between 2007 and 2012 document a significant increase in the variability of broadband infrastructure quality, which helps explain growing demand for technologies and policies that counteract information asymmetries between network operators and end users. A cross-country analysis documents the negative association between quality uncertainty and variations in digital infrastructure quality. The analysis suggests public policies and business models that promote market transparency can enhance the efficiency of the broadband access market on the edge of the internet and stimulate incentives for the diffusion of next generation platforms.
The formulation of a next generation regulatory model for access and interconnection by 2020 needs to respond to the many pressure points to which the existing regulatory framework for electronic communications has been subject since 2002. These factors range from the analytical elements of the system of market analysis and remedy selection, commercial and technological developments, the adoption of new policy orientations by the European Commission, and the institutional framework for decision-making. The Paper explores the value of maintaining fundamental elements of the present regulatory regime, while adopting a more “hybridized” approach which seeks to bridge the twin disciplines of regulation and competition law.
In this paper we scrutinize the request to regulate access to the OTTs' essential services bottleneck based on insights from the economic literature. First, we delineate that OTTs may pursue a one-sided or two-sided business model, which makes a fundamental difference with respect to the underlying economics. Focusing on two-sided content markets, we then discuss three scenarios that differ in the degree of competition that OTTs may face, ranging from potential competition over access-based competition (via access regulation) to actual platform competition. Although access regulation may have merits, it is very questionable whether such regulation should be pursued due to a high uncertainty concerning the economic benefits and necessity as well as practical legal problems.
Over the recent years, the development of Internet banking and mobile banking has had a considerable impact on competition in the retail banking industry. In some countries, the regulatory framework has been adapted to allow non-banks to operate in retail payments and compete with banks for deposits. Several platforms or large retailers have started to offer innovative financial products to their customers. In this paper, we survey the issues related to innovation and competition in Internet banking and mobile banking and discuss some perspectives for future research.
Given the volumes of data that are now generated by mobile networks due to the almost ubiquitous use of mobile phones by the majority of the population, this data can be considered as big data. Spurred by the exponential growth of mobile connectivity, the attendant large volumes of mobile network big data (MNBD), offer the possibility to obtain rich behavioral insights at a scale that was never possible before. MNBD is also one of the few sources of information on low-income groups. The focus of this paper is to illuminate both academics as well as policy makers on the potential uses of MNBD for public purposes, as well as to articulate the challenges that need to be addressed if such work is to be mainstreamed. This paper also provides a literature review of existing work that has leveraged MNBD to produce insights to inform a host of public policy domains including Transport, Economic Development and Health.
Productivity growth is the main driver of living standards. But productivity has slowed down over the past decade, starting already before the crisis. This paper shows that this is linked to a slowdown in the diffusion of global frontier innovations to other firms and difficulties in reallocating resources to the most productive firms. The paper also points to some key barriers to the diffusion of new innovations that prevent new knowledge and technology from flowing to less productive firms. Finally, it explores policy reforms that can help revive the diffusion machine and strengthen productivity growth.
This paper deals with the role of ICTs in the recent productivity slowdown, and with their possible future impact on productivity in developed countries: the United States (US), the Euro Area (EA), the United Kingdom (UK) and Japan. Few papers analyze the recent slowdown of the ICT contribution to productivity growth, and these papers, which concern only the US, disagree, as it will be stressed, on some important aspects. Some of the main outputs of our analysis are the following: i) A dramatic productivity slowdown has happened in the U.S. and other developed areas since the early 2000s; ii) This productivity slowdown seems to be at least partly linked to a decrease of ICT, and more precisely of chip performance gains, and to the end of the ICT increasing diffusion as a factor of production; iii) A growing attention given by chip producers to reduce heat (or, in other words, power consumption) could have contributed to the chip performance (in terms of clock speed) slowdown; iv) Some big ICT improvements will happen in the future, the next operational probably being the 3D chip; v) Large productivity gains could also be generated from an extension of the use of available chip capacities in a lot of areas, since 2005 this development being called by ITRS the 'More than Moore' process; vi) Benefits from technological changes and from the 'More than Moore' process will partly depend on institutional appropriate changes, for example concerning regulations on the labor and product markets.
The development of mobile payment platforms in developing countries is revolutionizing access to finance for the poor. Mobile payment platforms allow their users to pay and transfer funds in mobile money, but also offer access to other financial products, such as savings or insurance. In this paper we first review the economic features of mobile payment systems in developing countries, and study the cooperation models that can emerge between the different firms potentially involved in a mobile payment transaction. We then discuss the main competition concerns that public authorities should be concerned about, and which regulatory tools they can consider as a remedy.
This paper reviews the latest evidence on the contribution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) – and the digital economy more broadly – on economic growth for Europe and the United States since the late 1990s until most recently. The paper provides estimates on the contributions from ICT to growth from three channels affecting the long-term growth performance of entire economies: 1) a productivity effect through the ICT-producing sector, 2) an investment effect from ICT-using industries through capital deepening, and 3) a productivity effect from an efficiency rise through the use of ICT which goes beyond the direct capital deepening effect. The study finds that the slowing of the total factor productivity growth rate in Europe reflects a failure to effectively adopt new technologies and innovation. It is also argued that the lack of rapid accumulation of intangible capital (such as information assets, innovative property, and economic competencies) constrains Europe's ability to accelerate and facilitate the innovation effects from digital technology. Finally, we discuss some policy implication emerging from our work, in particular the need to complete the Single Market in Europe to improve the productivity effects from the digital economy.
The present paper analyses competition in the crowdfunding market in the light of the theory of two-sided markets, with the objective to understand the strategies used by platforms in this nascent industry. It also discusses the experience of policymakers in selected countries in trying to address concerns related to information asymmetries in this new environment.
Canada-USA comparisons are used to examine whether recent wage is a general phenomenon, or more of a U.S. experience (it is the latter). The role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in polarization is examined and the Canadian productivity and ICT lags relative to the U.S. are discussed. ICT is a recent tool and thus discussions of its demise need to be cautious.
Rather than a general pan-European trend towards more symmetry, the European electronic communication markets face increasingly a dichotomy between countries with significant intermodal competition and countries without. Although researchers have suggested that there is a (negative) causal relation between the level of access regulation and investment, this conclusion is not supported by any empirical findings and is likely to be incorrect. The real major determinant for the investment in NGA seems to be the pre-existing susceptibility of countries to platform competition, which concurs with the tendency to symmetry. Regulators should seek to optimally use this susceptibility, and avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Based on a classification of markets by the degree of susceptibility to platform competition this paper tries to provide guidance as to how regulatory policy can ensure optimal outcomes for consumers in various types of markets.
