Does liberalization mean libertarianism, with no role for regulation?
Suppose the telecommunications infrastructure keeps evolving towards institutional diversification and technological upgrade. What then? At present, the focus of attention is on restrictions — technological, regulatory, political, and financial. Yet in the developed world, the day is approaching, historically speaking, when many of these bottlenecks will be overcome — when entry by various service providers is wide open; fiber is widespread; radio-based carriers fill in the white spots in the map of telecommunications ubiquity; and global carriers operate beyond their home territory. In such an environment, what market structure can we expect? And what regulatory environment need we erect? It is time therefore to ask a fundamental question for future telecommunications policy: After competition, what? The conventional scenario for the evolution of telecommunications, offered by traditional state monopoly carriers around the world as their vision of the future, was the integrated sing
