Deregulating and liberalizing the North-American telecommunications market: Explaining the US-approach

This paper examines the substantial regulatory changes in North American telecommunications markets over the past decade. We argue that a combination of U.S. domestic politics and the logic of international strategic positioning produced substantial and far-reaching reform driven primarily by multilateral actions at the WTO and a set of unilateral U.S. initiatives (primarily benchmarks). Internationally, although NAFTA played an important role as a „building block“ for the WTO agreement, we argue the lack of market coverage and more far-reaching WTO agreement ultimately limited NAFTA's role in driving reform. The logic of U.S. domestic politics also played a central role by putting certain constraints on what the U.S. would accept in a telecommunications trade deal. Specifically, there was broad political support for a deal, but the particular problems facing U.S. carriers in competitive international markets meant any deal had to cover all major telecommunications markets and had to address the very real anti-competitive opportunities open to foreign monopolists. Our argument suggests continued reform is likely to be driven primarily by the framework established at the WTO, although the U.S. will continue to use unilateral initiatives to drive reform acceptable to key U.S. political actors.