Compelled disclosure of Internet interconnection agreements creates “anticompetitive...
Compelled disclosure of Internet interconnection agreements creates “anticompetitive risks,” said a paper by the Free State Foundation (http://bit.ly/1lSLuBo). The FCC’s recent announcement that the agency has requested copies of the agreements that Netflix has with ISPs Comcast and Verizon “has…
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renewed calls for the Commission to make these agreements public,” wrote Boston College Associate Law Professor Daniel Lyons, a member of FSF’s board of academic advisers. “While transparency is often a laudatory policy goal,” proposals that all network interconnection agreements be filed with the commission and open to public inspection “is misguided and may ultimately harm the very competition that proponents seek to protect,” the paper said. The net neutrality rules requiring ISPs to disclose the terms upon which they sell broadband access to consumers are “very different from mandating detailed disclosure of specific, confidential business-to-business agreements negotiated between sophisticated parties in a highly competitive interconnection market,” said the paper, released Thursday. “It is a basic tenet of economic and industrial organization literature that sharing competitively sensitive information among rivals can facilitate tacit collusion."