Telecommunications Policy and Regulation: The Impact of Competition and Technological Change

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

These are the papers that were presented at a conference held in late 1984. The rationale was “the need for telecommunications regulation to respond to rapid and radical technological change, and in particular to explore possible appeals to competitive market forces as a substitute for traditional direct regulation” (p.ix). If that is true, then why are these papers being printed and published so late? They are already two years past their presentation date, and I suspect that some parts of them might be even older than that. There is no index nor any great bibliography to slow down the process. Stanbury even had to contribute a paper to bring the book up through 1985 in dealing with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. If indeed regulations need to adapt to quickly changing technologies, then perhaps the regulators themselves should be informed a little more swiftly ...

The material here deals mostly with how policy develops within the Canadian context, although there is a paper from Richard Wiley summarizing “lessons from the United States.” A useful if somewhat tardy compilation of ideas.