Persistence of Monopolistic Bottlenecks in Telecommunications and Internet Services

Abstract

Günter Knieps provides a concise description of the service convergence in the telecommunications and electronic media industries and of some of the regulatory challenges implied by this trend. Service convergence means that specific services (e.g., video streaming) are made available to end customers over different networks (e.g., coax cable broadcasting and point-to-multipoint radio infrastructures). Service convergence has to be differentiated from the network convergence notion (cf. GERPOTT, 1998a, p.1). The latter implies that different telecommunication services (e.g. voice and picture transmission) are no longer provided via separate networks, but rather that a single integrated infrastructure platform is used to supply the different services to end customers. Knieps convincingly shows that the diffusion of decentralized IP/TCP-based client-server-computer networks (i.e., the so-called Internet) is a key driver of both service and network convergence.