Paper in Harvard International Law Journal by Jeffrey Rohlfs of S...
Paper in Harvard International Law Journal by Jeffrey Rohlfs of Strategic Policy Research and American Enterprise Institute Fellow Gregory Sidak questions propriety of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) promoting U.S. telecom policy in Japan. U.S. govt. took position in 1997…
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that World Trade Organization (WTO) telecom agreement required its signatory nations to follow FCC policy on telecom regulation, paper said. USTR since then “has sought to influence, under the implicit threat of trade sanctions, Japan’s domestic regulatory policy on the pricing of mandatory competitor access to the local network belonging to the operating companies of... NTT,” paper said: “We question the propriety of using the USTR to influence the domestic regulatory policy of another country on a topic as complex as the efficient pricing of mandatory access to unbundled network elements.” There are “substantive difficulties [in] engrafting the FCC’s interconnection policy onto the telecommunications marketplace of another nation,” paper said. Adopting U.S. telecom policy requires detailed economic expertise and significant resources and has led to many controversies, paper said: “The USTR cannot credibly make the interconnection pricing policies of another nation a legitimate concern of U.S. trade policy.” -- http://papers.ssrn.com/author=206474.