Universal service: beyond established practice to possibility space [An article from: Telecommunications Policy]

This digital document is a journal article from Telecommunications Policy, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
A number of proposals have been put forward to reform universal service and make it compatible with the new competitive telecommunications environment in the United States. The diversity and apparent contradictions between these proposals makes the public policy dialog scattered and confused. This paper introduces the idea of a 'possibility space' delineated by two dimensions-'intervention' and 'locus'-that lays out the contours of the emerging intellectual landscape by placing past practices as well as present proposals on the same conceptual plane. It suggests that the current approach to universal service reforms continues to be bound by the self-imposed limitations of a past regulatory era, and that a heterogeneous universal service policy is likely to be more suited to the new telecommunications environment.