This paper examines the net neutrality debate in countries outside the U.S., particularly in the EU. Most appear to have endorsed the idea of net neutrality and believe that policies promoting unbundling – mandatory network sharing – will ensure neutral networks. We argue that unbundling may not necessarily affect incumbent incentives to prioritize certain traffic. Because unbundling can affect investment incentives, we use a new dataset to examine empirically the effects of unbundling on investment in new fiber networks in Europe. We find a significant negative correlation between the number of unbundled DSL connections per capita and the number of fiber connections.
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Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and also a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University’s public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI – Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
