"Let Them Make Toll Calls": A State Regulator's Lament
分析1960年代末FCC引入电信竞争后，联邦政策如何通过放松管制和拆分AT&T推动竞争，以及州监管者因收入转移和管辖权冲突而普遍反对该政策的经济与政治原因。
In the late 1960's, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) introduced competition into telecommunications. Initially limited to specific services and types of customer equipment, the limits soon gave way. By 1980, the FCC's policy was to promote competition. In 1982, the Antitrust Division settled its suit against AT&T with close to total victory, achieving divestiture of the Bell Operating Companies (BOC). AT&T remains in equipment and interexchange services, which are growing increasingly competitive. To facilitate divestiture, the FCC adopted several policies: asserting jurisdiction regarding depreciation and then adopting methods that more nearly reflect economic costs, eliminating regulation of equipment prices, and restructuring the procedures whereby interstate services share local exchange costs. Two aspects of these new policies are worth emphasizing. First, astonishingly enough, economics played a central role in changing federal telecommunications policy, as acknowledged by Philip Verveer (1984), the lawyer who developed the antitrust case against AT&T, the Chief of the FCC's Cable Television Bureau when cable was deregulated, and the Chief of the Common Carrier Bureau when the FCC formally adopted the policy of minimizing federal regulation of telecommunications. The intellectual foundation of these policies is an economic case that the industry will be more efficient if it is minimally regulated and maximally competitive. Second, the new federal policy is widely despised by state regulators. My title is from an eloquent decision in Texas, which also characterized cost-causative pricing as from the Antoinette School of Rate Design (Mary Ross McDonald and Angela Marie Demerle, 1984, p. 35). State regulators dislike federal procompetitive policy because it transferred several billion dollars of revenue responsibility to the states and threatens state regulatory policies. Thus far, the state response has hardly been accommodative. Instead, federal and state regulators are fighting a three-front Jurisdiction War. This paper briefly analyzes the economics and politics of state resistance to federal policies. For more details, see my companion paper (1985).