This volume, edited by the prize-winning Professor Martin Fransman, is both timely and important. While it is best suited for an audience with a high level of interest, that interest could be in Broadband, in the international hi-tech environment, or in the legislative and economic environments of Japan, Korea, China, the United States, France, Germany, Italy or Sweden. Each of these nations is the subject of a complete chapter in the edited work.
The value of any edited work must lie largely in the quality of the individual contributors. These are, like the editor himself, a highly qualified group. The majority are both natives of the nation about which they write, and well-trained economists. Their overall perspectives are quite clear: The United States has chosen to permit an oligopoly of non-competitive firms to control the industry. Moreover, competition has declined rather than increased in the industry, due to federal policies.
In the absence of competition in America, disruptive technologies are restrained. The competitors tend to compete with each other over service and inconsequential factors, rather than to markedly increase speed or to develop new technologies or even to carry current technology to its logical end-point, full fiber to the home. In short, in America, competition is restrained largely to the allocation of advertising budgets. However, to their credit, the contributors do not risk broad generalizations but rather continually point out that there are often no simple answers in this field. There are cases in which market regulation clearly facilitates the development of broadband, and others when competition is critical.
For a full review see Interface, Volume 7, Issue 6.