Economic doctrines and network policy

Disagreements over how to craft Internet policy have become more and more contentious and political. Beyond the technical and engineering aspects are economic questions, and the points of view of various stakeholders and participants on such network policy issues stem from differing economic philosophies. This paper postulates and describes four competing economic doctrines: conservative neoclassical, liberal neoclassical, neo-Keynesian, and innovation economics. It explains how each doctrine leads to different views of appropriate network policy and explores the influence of doctrine on four controversial network policy issues: broadband competition, net neutrality, copyright, and privacy. Understanding this doctrine based source of differences over network policy should help policy makers better understand core issues and make more informed policy decisions. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.