This innovative study of the role of competition law in the telecommunications industry starts from a classic perspective: While, in principle, regulation benefits social welfare and efficient allocation of resources, past regulatory experience shows that regulation can be flawed and lead to welfare harm rather than good. In the telecommunications industry specifically, inappropriately designed sector-specific remedies and regulatory delays in the introduction of new telecommunications services can hold up the development of the market towards effective competition and could incur considerable welfare losses. In addition, conventional antitrust analysis still lags behind the dynamic nature of the electronic communications markets.
Milena Stoyanova sets out to establish a new understanding of the role of sector-specific regulation and competition law enforcement in the electronic communications sector, addressing such questions as the following:
- Why a new regulatory framework?
- Are sectoral regulation and competition law enforcement mutually exclusive or complementary?
- Why should electronic communications markets be regulated to conform to competition law principles?
- What does competition law add to sector-specific regulation?
- What is the relationship or proportion between regulation and competition law enforcement?
The author discusses the legal basis and rationale for the application of the essential facility doctrine to the electronic communications sector, and argues for new regulatory responses to the emergence of collective dominant firms in an oligopolistic setting and to the potential of multifirm conduct to restrict competition through pricesqueezing and other tactics. The book concludes with a specific case study on the harmonisation of recent Bulgarian legislation with the European Community sector-specific and competition law regimes a propos the electronic communications sector.