Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Regulations


There are generally three forms of regulations to correct market failure:

  1. Economic regulation: To check exclusionary and exploitative conduct of players with Significant Market Power. This is exercised through price regulation, competition law, and other ex ante requirements including unbundling or requirements to provide access to essential facilities
  2. Public interest/ consumer protection: To correct negative externalities, ensure distributional justice and protect the consumer (e.g. through minimum quality of service, to ensure safety and security, correct information asymmetries, etc). This could take the form of universal service obligations, quality of service requirements, security screening/vetting, and consumer protection frameworks such as requiring key service terms to be clearly stated upfront and providing dispute resolution options.
  3. Technical regulation: To standardise, coordinate and ensure inter-operability. This is exercised through standards setting, registration and testing of the product/resource. 

There should also be attention paid to challenges of enforcing the regulations.