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Why Regulate the ICT Sector?

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Emerging ICT Policies and Regulations

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Abstract

The information economy is being described as the second machine age with computing systems becoming more intelligent augmented by ubiquitous Internet connectivity (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014). As number of Internet users inch near the 4 Billion mark, close to 3 Million applications are available in Google Play store for download and use. More people than ever are using Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and Instagram and spending billions of hours browsing, chatting, commenting, and forwarding digital messages. These digital goods and services create large consumer surplus through reduced search times, bridging information asymmetries, removing intermediaries, enabling collaborative projects, and so on. However, recent episodes on data leakage and breaches by various Internet companies have prompted regulators and policymakers worldwide to prescribe code of conduct in an ever-evolving technology landscape. In this first chapter of the book, we illustrate the basic tenets of regulation and we try to provide answers to the following questions:

  • What conditions of the market and industry require regulatory intervention?

  • Why is it that telecommunications have been a highly regulated industry for quite some time in almost all countries?

  • What are the general regulatory principles as applicable to this sector?

A lot is changing in the digital world. We also need to change the policies, so we can grapple with this issue. Policies for new, digital world can’t be the same as those for physical world…these same policies can’t just be exported (for digital space)

—Chairman, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.*

*Economic Times. (7 Mar 2018). Regulatory policies must change to cater to digital world: Trai chief. Available at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/regulatory-policies-must-change-to-cater-to-digital-world-trai-chief/articleshow/63201359.cms?from=mdr, accessed on 12 June e019.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890: “Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the Several States or foreign nations is declared to be illegal.. Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and of conviction thereof, shall be punished …”. Available at: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/ShermanClaytonFTC_Acts.pdf accessed on 25 Jan 2018.

  2. 2.

    For the call between two communicating parties, while the originator of the call can have many options of access providers and associated networks, the termination shall be on only one terminating network, and hence, the terminating access provider can have a monopoly influence on that call.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, Bengaluru, India

    V. Sridhar

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  1. V. Sridhar
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Sridhar, V. (2019). Why Regulate the ICT Sector?. In: Emerging ICT Policies and Regulations. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9022-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9022-8_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-32-9021-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-32-9022-8

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