The FCC should refocus on intermodal competition and...
The FCC should refocus on intermodal competition and if it won’t, Congress should require it to, said Free State Foundation Research Fellow Seth Cooper in a paper released Thursday (http://bit.ly/1000FDI). The commission’s recent wireless competition report “provides perhaps the latest…
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example of the FCC’s apparent disinterest in consumer welfare dynamics of wireless versus wireline competition,” Cooper said. “Likewise, the FCC’s 14th Video Competition Report, lacking a hard look at increasingly common cross-platform competitive effects, contained few meaningful insights to inform regulatory policy.” The FCC should “take a more rigorous and empirical approach to intermodal competition,” he said. “It has ample authority to do so. Yet, the agency’s apparent reluctance to apply intermodal competition insights in its regulatory policymaking suggests the need for a Congressional response. One modest reform proposal would be to require a single FCC report on the communications market that seriously assesses intermodal competition. A unified competition report would be better suited to capturing the competitive effects of substitutes and cross-platform rivalry that should be essential to informing digital age communications policy."