This chapter focuses on the regulation of the provision of telecommunications services and the operation of telecommunications networks in the US, principally in the fixed, cable, and mobile sectors, but satellite regulation is briefly touched upon. The chapter begins by giving a brief history of US telecommunications regulation, and provides an overview of the numerous governmental bodies involved in the regulation of the US telecommunications market. It summarizes the licensing requirements under the Communications Act of 1934, and briefly explains the US approach to certain key regulatory issues in the EU: access and interconnection, spectrum management, broadband, universal service, the application of competition law to the sector, and communications privacy. It concludes with a discussion of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s regulation of IP-enabled services.

On 1 August 2008, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted a controversial order against Comcast, a cable network operator and content distributor and the second largest provider of broadband internet access in the United States, finding it had violated the FCCs policy of "network neutralit" by deliberately interfering with the ability of its customers to use BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications which permit the sharing of video and other large data files. Network neutrality is a concept with many variations, but which has generally come to mean that broadband access providers must ensure that their subscribers are free, of their own choosing, to access internet content and services, run related applications and connect devices to the internet. Regardless of the merits of the FCC's network neutrality policy, which are themselves debatable, the basis of the 3:2 decision of the FCC commissioners rests on untested and questionable legal ground. The order also has a number of evidentiary weaknesses and raises broader policy issues concerning internet regulation, the latter of which are of interest to Australian policymakers as the government considers the appropriate regulatory framework for the national broadband network.

This article begins consideration of the public engagement mechanisms in Deployment of Mobile Phone Network Infrastructure, a legally-binding industry code of practice adopted by the Australian Communications Industry Forum, first registered by the Australian Communications Authority in 2002 and applicable to providers of "public mobile telecommunications services". This article explains the public engagement mechanisms set out in the code and evaluates them in light of certain fairness and competency factors. Theanalysis draws on interviews with individuals and local councils in northern New South Wales notified under the code, mobile carriers and their consultant planners. Although it welcomes the carriers' efforts to inform communities of infrastructure roll-out, it argues that aspects of the mechanisms may need to be reconsidered, especially the role definition of individuals in the process.

The deployment of SMS (Short Message Services) and MMS (Multimedia Message Services) technology now enables mobile phone users to access a wide variety of text and visual content, including video clips and still images. Content providers have capitalised on the new technology and are offering a variety of premium rate services whereby subscribers pay the cost of accessing text and visual content via their mobile phone bills or other means. Mobile carriage service providers are also offering Intranet or walled-garden services which can be accessed via mobile phones. This article discusses how the content of these services is regulated in Australia. It traces the development of the regulatory framework for the content of these services and then evaluates the policy and practical implications of the Australian approach. It argues that the prohibition of material classified as X18+ on SMS/MMS and walled-garden services is overly prescriptive. It questions the government's decision to prohibit X18+ material on the basis of "content neutrality" in light of differences in the treatment of content accessed via different media platforms. Finally, it highlights a principal weakness of the current regulatory framework — the absence of any controls on the deployment of location-based services — and deals with some of the practical difficulties of the Australian approach.

To explore the question, are environmental regulations changing the nature of land rights, this paper from basic concepts of land law and rights, at common law and under statutes across Australia. The analysis concludes that:• environmental regulations and other legislation have substantially altered and continue to alter the common law notion of property rights• constitutional and other legal constraints, mean the battle for land rights will be fought at Commonwealth and State policy levels.

The concept of self-regulation in all of its forms has become a foundation stone in the theoretical and practical debates about the role and function of the modern 'decentred' regulatory state. In the decentred state, government, among other things, ceases to rely upon the old tool of 'command and control' regulation to achieve social policy goals. Instead, government relies on alternative systems developed by industry and others and faces the arguably more daunting challenge of trying to harness the internal regulatory capacity of these other regulatory systems, directing and steering them in a way that ensures they deliver the goods and services sought by society in accordance with accepted social values. Although the focus of the theoretical regulatory debate has started to shift to the meta-regulatory potential of law and the ability of government to 'regulate self-regulation', the question of how and why self-regulatory rule-making regimes actually emerge remains largely unexplored from an empirical standpoint. A better understanding of why self-regulatory rule-making regimes develop and the roles of law and government (if any) in the emergence of those systems is necessary, however, if meta-regulating law is to have any hope of becoming more effective than the blunt instrument of the old-styled regulation of the centred state.