Classroom Companion: Business

22.2.7 
 Non-Price Discrimination
There are also several factors other than price that may twist competition in an 
undesirable direction. Examples are:
5
Dragging out interconnection negotiations, thereby slowing down the market 
growth of the competitor
5
Deliver insufficient interconnection specifications, also slowing down competi-
tion or making interconnection more expensive for the competitor
5
Deliver stripped down functionality, thereby disallowing the competitor access 
to some interconnection services
5
Reduced quality of technical interfaces (e.g., throttled data rate, slow connec-
tion establishment, long latency, and so on)
5
Unwarranted requirements (e.g., liabilities in case of network failures)
22.2 · Mobile Network Regulations

---

340
22
Negotiating the interface between MVNOs and MNOs is particularly complicated 
because it includes both commercial and technical aspects that are much knottier 
than the interconnection of ordinary MNOs (Audestad & Gaivoronski, 
2001
).
22.3
 Internet Regulations
Internet played no role in the de-monopolization of telecommunications. During 
the 1980s, the Internet grew in size to interconnect universities, laboratories, and 
innovative industries for exchange of emails, ideas, documents, and other informa-
tion. The Internet was more or less a research network not recognized by telecom-
munications operators, except that they provided backbone connections between 
routers at universities and laboratories, thereby building up a global data network 
without central governance. At the same time, the telecommunications monopolies 
developed their own standards for data communications: an inflexible and short- 
lived circuit switched data network based on the same technology as the telephone 
network and a packet switched data network (the X.25 network) less flexible and 
more expensive to build than the Internet. The telecommunications operators lev-
ied charges for the use of these networks (e.g., a fixed price per data packet sent) to 
regain investments, cover operational costs, and increase their revenues. The use of 
these networks never gained momentum since the need for data communications 
outside the research community was almost absent at that time and the Internet 
offered the type and volume of data communications academia needed free of 
charge.
In the mid-1990s, the general public discovered that the World Wide Web 
offered them opportunities that had never existed before, for example, access to 
electronic newspapers, public information, and entertainment. Moreover, people 
could access this information from anywhere and at any time, thereby offering 
them a new freedom of choice. The World Wide Web was designed for implementa-
tion on the Internet, and in order to meet the new demands from the users, the 
telecommunications operators also started building their own fragments of the 
Internet to offer web browsing services. This replaced the need for other data net-
works, and the Internet soon became the only data network interconnecting users 
worldwide. As a consequence, the telecommunications operators could no longer 
levy charges for use of the Internet in the same way as in the telephone network.
When the 3G mobile network was introduced in 2000, the application of 
Internet services on mobile phones made a substantial jump. International tele-
communications agreements included the telephone network but not the Internet. 
This had one particular effect on prices while roaming to another country. While 
the roaming prices for telephony where regulated and agreed upon by the mobile 
operators, they could levy any price for data calls to and from users roaming from 
another country. In several countries, the price roaming users had to pay for data 
calls was excessive. Moreover, some mobile networks generated data traffic to 
roaming mobile terminals such as unnecessary updating and messages. The user 
had no control over this traffic but had, nevertheless, to pay for it. For this reason,