Are traffic charges needed to avert a coming capex catastrophe?

The net neutrality debate is now gathering steam in Europe, both at the Commission level and in member states. Against this background, four European telcos commissioned a report from AT Kearney, to support their opposition to net neutrality regulation. This report, A Viable Future Model for the Internet, claims that carriers are facing ballooning capex requirements to fund the growth of internet traffic and that the best way to address this structural problem is via traffic charges to online service providers.

In response Robert Kenny has written a paper, Are traffic charges need to avert a coming capex catastrophe?, that takes a critical look at the AT Kearney report, considering it from technical, economic and regulatory perspectives.

It received several positive reviews, and has been cited by BEREC (the umbrella body of European regulators), ARCEP (the French regulator) and the Norwegian Posts & Telecoms Authority. 

You can download the report here.

Content Regulation in an Internet Age

Tim Suter has authored a short report on the changing role of content regulation in an internet age.

You can download the paper here.

Google International Broadband Pricing Study

Google have published our analysis on international fixed and mobile broadband prices.

The dataset (the fourth iteration we have prepared for Google) includes over 5,000 fixed and mobile broadband tariffs, from over 100 countries. 

You can access the datasets here.

International online news consumption

In this paper we examine patterns of international online news consumption, looking at key differences between countries and at which organisations have been successful in building a cross-border presence. Key conclusions are:

• The news sites in the world with the largest reach are predominantly online-only sites
• However, in most individual countries most of the leading news sites are newspapers. The US, China, Brazil and Russia are key exceptions
• Few sites have significant cross-border reach, at least in the largest internet markets. Yahoo and the BBC (and likely Google News) are key exceptions

You can download the paper here.

Online networks for innovation

Knetworks is an EU funded project supporting innovation in the Atlantic region. The Oxford Internet Institute (one of the participants) worked with Rob Kenny to prepare a paper on online strategies for innovation.

The paper takes a pragmatic approach, using tourism, eGovernment and knowledge transfer (from universities to industry) as examples, and providing practical recommendations.