Public policy and private investment in advanced telecommunications infrastructure

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was supposed to usher in a new era of competition in U.S. telecommunications markets in which advanced services were made available to all consumers. In this article, we discuss how policies designed to promote competition, investment, and universal deployment may conflict with each other. We do not believe that these conflicts are the inevitable consequences of conflicts between the objectives; we do, however, believe that there are inescapable conflicts between the specific policies being implemented in pursuit of these objectives.