Policy and regulatory decision-making under uncertainty

The complexity of many regulated industries is increasing. We also live in a world of 'macro' shocks, such as the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. In combination, this makes forecasting difficult.

However, virtually every regulatory decision involves comparing anticipated futures and choosing the action that leads to the best-predicted outcome. Thus the increasing difficulty of forecasting is a challenge for regulators.

Together with Access Partnership, Communcations Chambers has published a paper addressing this challenge, and proposing five broad ways of improving decision-making under uncertainty: delegation, experiments, forecasting, waiting, and contingency planning & error correction.

Prospects for consolidation amongst UK fibre-deployers

With over 100 companies deploying fibre-to-the-premise in the UK, there is an industry expectation that consolidation is inevitable. But that doesn't mean that it will be simple, or that potential acquirees will receive attractive bids.

In this paper, Robert Kenny considers

• How consolidation might play out
• What will drive deal dynamics and pricing
• What the practical issues are for various likely consolidators
• What the consolidation of the cable industry from the '90s onwards can teach us

PSB Prominence in a Converged Media World

This report by Robin Foster and Tom Broughton and commissioned by the BBC, examines whether the UK’s media prominence rules need updating to continue to support universal access to public service broadcasting content in a converged world and, if so, what regulatory approach policy makers should consider.

Reconciling private market governance and law: A policy primer for digital platforms

This paper, launched at a Lisbon Council event in Brussels, considers the opportunities and anxieties in relation to digital platforms, and develops a policy appraisal framework in relation to digital platforms. Digital platforms compete to serve the interests of participants in the market, including crafting rules - embodied in codes of conduct and software code - that grow the market and help address market imperfections. Further, digital platforms are heterogeneous and no flavour of ‘platform regulation’ is likely to be appropriate across the entire economy. A common theme is that digital platform market governance (‘code’) needs to be reconciled with law and regulation; rather than thinking of law as something that should be imposed on a market which might otherwise be considered 'lawless’. This perspective requires a different approach to thinking about regulation, and may require new institutional approaches.

Recurring spectrum fees

This paper considers the impact of recurring spectrum fees. It concludes that fees in relation to mobile use do not promote the optimal use of spectrum since operators face their own use opportunity cost, irrespective of fees, in terms of the trade-off between meeting data demand growth through more intensive use of existing spectrum (including investing in mobile sites) and the purchase of additional spectrum in future. Further, given the ongoing reallocation of spectrum for mobile use, mobile use has higher value than alternative use at the margin. Mobile operators therefore face the opportunity cost of spectrum absent fees, whilst fees may harm investment.