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What rules, if any, should regulators put in place to provide incentives for timely and efficient investment in next generation fibre access networks (NGA) while, at the same time, preventing monopoly abuse, either by taking monopoly rents from end users or harming downstream competition? This paper aims to focus on these issues.

The findings in this paper are based on review of existing work in the area and on interviews with 25 operators and regulators across the European Union.

Active (bitstream) remedies will be important for preserving competition in the supply of retail, NGA‐based, products. Regulators should specify the price regulation principles, which would apply to operators found to have significant market power (SMP) in NGA supply in advance of any market definition and SMP assessment. Regulators should allow access providers to provide distinct NGA‐based bitstream products to meet the needs of different segments of the end‐user market and to then charge for these products at the wholesale level so as to reflect their value to end users rather than their costs.

This paper is designed to simulate general debate on the best way to regulate NGA

A comparative study of trade union finances, in particular those of SOGAT and the NGA, shows that these two printing unions face severe financial problems, although this is caused, in part, by their high levels of expenditure compared with other unions. Subscriptions are also much higher than for the average of all trade unions. Doubts are expressed as to whether the membership will continue to support their unions to such an extent.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

The purpose of this paper is to set out the history and content of the European Commission's Recommendation on the regulation of next generation access networks, published in September 2010. The aim is to assess the Recommendation in terms of its likely impact on harmonisation and certainty of regulation within the European Union and on investment and competition.

The approach adopted is to review the European Commission's Recommendation from the standpoint of regulatory economics.

The publication in September 2010 of the Recommendation on the regulation of next generation access networks completed a process which had begun two years and two drafts previously. The paper sets out the background to the decision to prepare a Recommendation for national regulators supervising the installation of fibre based networks, where the fibre might go either to the premises (FTTP) or to the street cabinet (FTTC). It also describes the development of the Recommendation from the first draft in September 2008 to the final draft in September 2010. It concludes that the delay in issuing the Recommendation created an interval in which national regulators pursued their own diverse policies, to the detriment of harmonisation. In terms of investment and competition, the successive drafts appear to have diminished pressure on competitors to build their own infrastructures, with consequential effects on the likely form of competition. Finally, a degree of regulatory uncertainty has been created in member states where the regulator has pursued in its market reviews of fibre access products remedies which are at odds with the Recommendation.

This is an early appraisal of a European Commission Recommendation which is likely to have a significant impact on European communications policy and regulation.

This paper aims to explore how stolen Indian antiquities were purchased by a major Australian collecting institution, despite cultural protection policies designed to prevent such inappropriate acquisitions. Using the acquisition of the Dancing Shiva as a case study, the purpose of this paper is to examine how collecting institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia experience difficulty when determining legal title through provenance research. The impact of incautious provenance research produces significant risk to the institution including damaging its social responsibility credentials and reputation when the acquisition is discovered to be stolen.

This research applies a qualitative case study method and analysis of sourced official policy documents, personal communication with actors involved with the case, media reports and published institutional statements.

This work identifies four contributing factors that resulted in the National Gallery of Australia’s acquisition of stolen Indian artefacts: a misguided level of trust of the art dealer based on his professional reputation; a problematic motivation to expand the gallery’s Asian art collection; a less transparent and judicious acquisition process; and a collaboration deficiency with cultural institutions in India. Crime preventative methods would appear to be a strategic priority to counter art crime of this nature.

Additional research into how collecting institutions can be effectively supported to develop and implement crime preventative methods, especially less-resourced institutions, can potentially further enhance cultural heritage protection.

Fostering a higher degree of transparency and institutional collaboration can enhance cultural heritage protection, develop a greater level of institutional ethics and social responsibility and identify any potential criminal activity. Changing the culture of “owning” to “loaning” may provide a long-term solution for cultural heritage protection, rather than incentivising a black market with lucrative sums of money paid for artefacts.

Art crime involving the illegal trade of antiquities is often misinterpreted as a victimless crime with no real harm to individuals. The loss of a temple deity statue produces significant spiritual anguish for the Indian community, as the statue is representative not only of their God but also of place. Collecting institutions have a social responsibility to prioritise robust provenance policy and acquisition practices above collection priorities.

Art crime is a relatively new area within criminology. This work examines issues involving major collecting institutions acquiring stolen cultural heritage artefacts and the impact art crime has on institutions and communities. This paper unpacks how motivations for growing more prestigious collections can override cultural sensibilities and ethical frameworks established to protect cultural heritage. It highlights the liabilities associated with purchasing antiquities without significant due diligence regarding provenance research and safeguarding cultural heritage. It also emphasises the importance for collecting institutions to establish robust acquisition policies to protect the reputation of the institutions and the communities they represent.

This paper aims to study the results of the public aid programmes, through supply-side subsidies, for ultra-fast next generation access (NGA) broadband deployment that have been developed in The Canary Islands since 2013. These findings will, in turn, hopefully help the policymakers of archipelagos define their own ultra-fast broadband development plans.

An empirical approach has been used, based on the observation of the historical results obtained in the archipelago and the way broadband was diffused throughout the territory.

Results show that the broadband has developed asymmetrically in the archipelago, which, in turn, has caused the onset of a triple spatial digital divide. It was also observed that some aspects of the current way that such programmes are created and, consequently, the way that public funds are allocated, that could be improved and might help prevent geographical discrimination. Lastly, several insights have been presented for further investigation.

A large amount of scientific research has been carried out studying ultra-fast broadband NGA networks deployment. Less literature can be found on this topic when considering the specificities of fragmented territories like archipelagos. This paper tries to contribute with some empirical insights about such specific scenarios.

The purpose of this paper is to expose the necessity of introducing some degree of flexibility in the definition of wholesale access price of FTTx, in the EU competition regulatory framework, and incorporating new regulatory actions to boost investment substitutability to ensure that NRAs accomplish dynamic and/or static efficiency targets.

Given the European historical context, the current preponderance of cable and the strong heterogeneity in NGA networks rollout across Europe, a policy-oriented analysis defines a set of recommendations useful for member states whose NGA networks market is in a more advanced state of development.

Flexibility is necessary in jurisdictions holding a highly competitive NGA wholesale market at the three previously described levels to avoid that strong dynamic efficiency is passed-through into excessive retail prices which may decrease static efficiency in greater proportion, thereby generating a deadweight loss.

The novel measures pointed out are part of the on-going debate concerning the revision of the European regulatory framework for NGA networks.

In this paper, a set of safe adaptive genetic algorithms (sGAs) is proposed based on the Splicing/Decomposable encoding scheme and the efficient speed‐up strategies developed by Xu et al.. The proposed algorithms implement the self‐adaptation of the problem representation, selection and recombination operators at the levels of population, individual and component which commendably balance the conflicts between “reliability” and “efficiency”, as well as “exploitation” and “exploration” existed in the evolutionary algorithms. It is shown that the algorithms converge to the optimum solution in probability one. The proposed sGAs are experimentally compared with the classical genetic algorithm (CGA), non‐uniform genetic algorithm (nGA) proposed by Michalewicz, forking genetic algorithm (FGA) proposed by Tsutsui et al. and the classical evolution programming (CEP). The experiments indicate that the new algorithms perform much more efficiently than CGA and FGA do, comparable with the real‐coded GAs — nGA and CEP. All the algorithms are further evaluated through an application to a difficult real‐life application problem: the inverse problem of fractal encoding related to fractal image compression technique. The results for the sGA is better than those of CGA and FGA, and has the same, sometimes better performance compared to those of nGA and CEP.

Purpose – This chapter describes how radical aims for community-owned broadband became compromised by the consequences of clientelism and elite patronage as some campaigners engaged in lobbying government.

Design/methodology/approach – Five years of participant observation and an auto-ethnographic methodology richly describe the author's involvement in a community broadband co-operative, various regional and national support groups and finally with a national group conducting campaigning, research and co-ordination activities for community ownership of Next Generation Access broadband.

Findings – This illustrates the difficulties faced by Third Sector and Civil Society organisations attempting to engage in lobbying activities in the same manner as conventional commercial lobbyists. In particular, it describes how lobbying necessitates a complex interlocking of activities, such as research, consultancy, conference organisation and other such forms of networking; and it describes how all of these activities can become subordinated to the interests of political patrons. It also suggests that the uncertainty around the meanings and relevance of the Third Sector/Civil Society has allowed the entry of older forms of exerting power such as clientelism and patronage.

Research limitations/implications – Further research is needed into a much larger group of organisations to examine the processes by which Third Sector and Civil Society groups engage with government.

Originality/value – The chapter uniquely applies Critical Management Studies and a political studies perspective on clientelism and patronage to the analysis of Third Sector and Civil Society organisations.

This paper seeks to set out a framework for assessing whether and how to intervene in the standardisation of new technologies, based on the experience of Ofcom, the UK converged communications regulator.

As part of its duties to promote the interests of consumers and citizens, Ofcom needed to decide whether or not to intervene in the standardisation of wholesale access to superfast broadband, in the context of the roll out of the next generation of telecommunications access networks.

Ofcom found that the case for intervention was finely balanced between, on the one hand, the risk to innovation and, on the other, the consumer welfare generated by the right combination of standardisation and network effects. Ofcom identified four basic models of intervention: take no formal action; require that infrastructure providers use open standards, without specifying which standards should be used; mandate a particular standard to be used; and specify the standard to be used. Ofcom developed a policy framework that assesses interventions in terms of prospects for innovation and network effects. This led it to choose an approach that initially involves no formal action. Instead, Ofcom facilitates industry leadership of standardisation whilst monitoring the emerging competitive environment and signalling both its desired outcomes and its determination to take action if competition does not develop.

It is too early to say whether this approach will ultimately prove successful, however the framework allows for progressive strengthening of intervention if competition is not forthcoming.

The paper delivers value in conceptualising and clarifying the overall approach to standardisation.