Subsidies from the high-cost fund to rural telecommunications providers have increased from $1.7 billion in 1999 to nearly $5 billion today. Distributors of the fund should move from the current inefficient system to one that awards subsidies through competitive bidding. Such reverse auctions for universal service have been used successfully in other countries and could reduce subsidies and benefit consumers.
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Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, a Policy Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and 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, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at the World Bank, and a staff economist at the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
