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The concept of light-handed regulation, including light-handed approaches to the regulation of airport services, is discussed. The rationale for the economic regulation of airport services and the traditional approaches used for economic regulation of airport charges are summarized. The evolution of international practice of light-handed regulation is outlined, including the experience with minimal regulation across monopoly industries in New Zealand and the acceptance of “negotiated settlements” in utility industries in North America. General reasons for moving to light-handed regulation of airports include the disadvantages of the price cap approach in practice and the benefits of facilitating greater negotiation between airports and users. Comparisons are made between alternative approaches to light-handed regulation of airport services, including price and quality of service monitoring, information disclosure regulation and negotiate-arbitrate regulation, approaches that have been applied to airport services in Australia and New Zealand. The role and nature of the incentives under each approach are discussed. The chapter concludes that whether light-handed regulation provides a suitable alternative approach to direct regulation depends on the market circumstances and the design characteristics of the light-handed approach.

With significant changes in the aviation industry, various airport–airline arrangements have been formed to achieve alternative objectives. However, no consensus has been reached on such arrangements’ economic effects and the associated optimal public policy. This chapter aims to provide an interpretive review of the common types of airport–airline arrangements, the different modeling approaches used and key conclusions reached by recent studies. Our review suggests that airport–airline arrangements can take diverse forms and have been widely used in the industry. They may allow the airport and its airlines to internalize demand externality, increase traffic volume, reduce airport investment risks and costs, promote capacity investment, enhance service quality, or simply are a response to the competition from other airport–airline chains. On the other hand, such vertical arrangements, especially for those exclusively between airports and selected airlines, could lead to collusive outcomes at the expenses of non-participating organizations. The effects of such arrangements are also significantly influenced by the contract type, market structure and bargaining power between the airport and airline sectors. While case by case investigations are often needed for important economic decisions, we recommend policy-makers to promote competition in the airline and airport segments whenever possible, and demand more transparency or regulatory reporting of such arrangements. Policy debates and economic studies should be carried out first, before intrusive regulations are introduced.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to review net neutrality and the notion that bright light rules are necessary to hold broadband providers from exercising market power. The 2015 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Open Internet Order asserted that broadband providers have the capability and incentive to harm their customers and third-party service providers. It imposed a set of rules to control broadband providers’ offers, prices, and traffic management. The 2017 FCC vacated all but the transparency provisions of the OIO, restoring the oversight of broadband to the FTC.

This paper offers a review of the evidence regarding the effects of net neutrality regulation, including an investigation of the incidence of violations, or lack thereof, during the 2020 pandemic in the United States. It provides a review of the net neutrality literature and the international research on broadband provider behaviour during COVID-19. The paper presents original research conducted with FCC and FTC reports and a survey of news stories. Brief reviews of federal data on network performance and broadband adoption provide additional context. Given the limited incidence of violations that could be uncovered for the period, the paper suggests why broadband providers behaved opposite to regulatory advocates’ predictions. Contrary to many policy assertions, broadband providers did not block or throttle service, nor did they increase prices arbitrarily or decrease quality. Broadband providers appeared to expand availability, lower broadband prices, and make more networks available, frequently without customer charge. The paper suggests how policy could be updated to reflect the actual behaviour of broadband providers.

While airports traditionally have been seen as classic examples of public enterprises, the government’s role in airport management has been changing throughout the world. This study explores airport governance models with a focus on stakeholder issues. Relatively little is known empirically about how public, private, or public–private partnership (PPP) provision of airport services affects different stakeholders. The main aim of this study is to develop a better understanding of the impact of airport governance forms on stakeholders. For this purpose, a theoretical background focused on identifying airport stakeholders and their conflicting interests is followed by a qualitative content analysis using past studies on airport management. The results suggest that a balanced approach is required to deal with stakeholder interests detached from their governance structures.

At any time, there will be differing views on what needs to be done to be properly accountable, because accountees are likely to be in favour of more accountability, and accountors, of less (Perks, 1993). This leads to a tension between these two groups (Ijiri, 1983).

This chapter reviews the effects of air transport liberalization, and investigates the roles played by airport-airline vertical arrangements in liberalizing markets. Our investigation concludes that liberalization has led to substantial economic and traffic growth. Such positive outcomes are mainly due to increased competition and efficiency gains in the airline industry, and positive externalities to the overall economy. Liberalization allows airlines to optimize their networks, and thus may introduce substantial demand and financial uncertainty to airports. Vertical arrangements between airlines and airports may offer a wide range of benefits to the parties involved, yet such arrangements could also lead to airline entry barriers which reduce the effects of liberalization. Three approaches have been developed to model the effects of liberalization in complex market conditions, which include the analytical, econometric and computational network methods. These approaches should be selectively utilized in policy studies on liberalization.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.