Supra-national regulation for supra-national telecommunications carriers?

The article reviews the extraordinary number of international ventures by major telecommunications organizations and explores problems for traditional national regulation that these global networks create. A theoretical model is defined that illustrates the adjustment process of different national policies to each other. The choice of various supra-national regulatory arrangements is shown to be affecting substantive policy. The article then discusses options for coordination and concludes that the concrete problems created by supra-national carriers do not justify the hidden cost of elaborate mechanisms of supra-national policy. Since such coordination has traditionally been used to prop up monopoly arrangements, a better approach for the foreseeable future is to encourage more national policy experimentation and focus less on international policy coordination.