Abstract
Due to its dynamic nature, and the increasing importance of competitive subparts, the telecommunications sector provides particularly interesting insights for studying regulatory unbundling. Based on the theory of monopolistic bottlenecks the fallacies of overregulation by undue unbundling obligations are indicated. Neither the promotion of infrastructure competition by mandatory unbundling of competitive subparts of telecommunications infrastructure, nor regulatory induced network fragmentation within monopolistic bottleneck components is justified. The impact of the shrinking of the areas of network specific market power on the remaining unbundling regulation is analyzed. Finally, the phasing-out potentials of unbundling regulation in European telecommunications markets are pointed out.
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