Thatcher, Mark --- "Sale of the Century: 3G Mobile Licensing in Europe" [2005] ELECD 361; in Black, Julia; Lodge, Martin; Thatcher, Mark (eds), "Regulatory Innovation" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: Regulatory Innovation

Editor(s): Black, Julia; Lodge, Martin; Thatcher, Mark

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845422844

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: Sale of the Century: 3G Mobile Licensing in Europe

Author(s): Thatcher, Mark

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

5. Sale of the century: 3G mobile phone
licensing in Europe
Mark Thatcher

INTRODUCTION
The licensing of 3G (third generation) mobile phones in Europe represented a
major change in the regulation of mobile communications. Discretionary allo-
cation of licences to favoured domestic national champions was replaced with
auctions or formalized high-cost beauty contests. Although auctions are an
`old instrument', their application in 3G mobile phone licensing can truly be
termed a regulatory innovation as it saw major alterations of instruments, the
degree of formality, competition, interests served, cost, cross-national learning
the positions of incumbent suppliers. Modification of 3G mobile phone licens-
ing represents at least a `second-order change' whereby instruments and tech-
niques are altered, and approaches a third-order change in which policy goals
and paradigms are altered (Hall 1993).
This chapter analyses 3G mobile phone licensing by drawing primarily on
the perspectives offered by the `state world' of innovation, namely the deci-
sions of the state. Its starting points are the claims by interest group and indus-
trial policy literatures that public policy-makers act in the interests of large
suppliers and arguments by comparative institutionalist studies that inherited
institutional arrangements result in major cross-national differences in inno-
vation. However the analysis also has implications for the individual world of
entrepreneurs who are argued to lead innovation and for the `world of the
innovation' since it considers how the features of 3G licence auctions in
Europe affected their cross-national spread.
This chapter explores ...