Competition in the backbone market

This article presents a competitive assessment of the global market for the provision of universal Internet connectivity (backbone market). We discuss the approach followed by the European Commission in two important merger cases. The main argument is for a restless evolution of the structure of the market, whereby a highly concentrated US-centric industry, with a strict vertical hierarchy between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and a neat separation between first-level ISPs and the rest of the market, is going to be superseded by a more horizontal-shaped configuration. It is argued that as the landscape of the industry is subject to continuous change, the approach followed by the European Commission in assessing the competitive forces that drive the industry is likely to be no longer appropriate. New behavioural strategies, such as differentiation through the introduction of new enhanced Internet services based on the concept of Quality of Service and, related to that, new competitive threats seem to characterise the foreseeable future of the Internet. We then investigate the competitive concerns that might emerge in the new environment.