Universal service to universal access and web accessibility
government vs. governance

"The concept of the universal service consists of two key words: Availability and affordability. In the United States, telephone services have been provided by a number of private telephone companies. In such a competitive market, universal service cannot be realized. In the U.S., therefore, both federal and state governments have established regulatory frameworks to assure the old plain telephone services all over the country. Since the 1980’s the universal service policy has started to be discussed outside of the U. S. because of the privatization of public telephone corporations and the introduction of a competition policy in the telephone market. On the other hand, the regulatory framework had to be reconsidered as many new entrants joined the telephone market. Before the deregulation, universal service was provided by the cross-subsidization between long line telephone carriers and small local telephone companies. However, this mechanism is not workable in the age of deregulation. Thus the universal service fund was introduced. In the late 1990’s, a similar fund system was also introduced in Japan. When the Internet was expanded outside of the academic, such a universal service concept was also expanded from the old telephone service to the Internet access. However, the Internet was emerged not in the traditional telephone industry; it came from the computer network world. In other words, the Internet service is outside of the telephone regulatory framework, and it has been supported by nongovernment organizations (NGOs), such as ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). The social system is sometimes called the 'Internet Governance', not 'Internet Regulation'. As the Internet service became a conventional communication service througout the world, such a traditional governance system has been reconsidered in several meetings. One of the issues in the meeting is the 'universal access', not 'universal service'. Thus, it is time to discuss the definition of the universal access and the role of governments in assuring the accessibility of the Internet. Now it is necessary to reexamine governmental role and governance process to make the Internet a more useful and valuable network which once expanded in an unregulated market environment. Regulatory history of the U.S. telecommunications industry reveals that governmental regulation has shifted from economic regulation to social one." [Information des Anbieters]