New Zealand is very interesting. They had a number of totally libertarian economists come to advise them around the time that....You may recall that in the early 1980s New Zealand technically went almost bankrupt. The International Monetary Fund came in and a number of steps were taken to privatize industry and to try to get the country back on track fiscally.
As part of that process, they experimented with something no other country had done, and they said we'll do without a telecom regulator, and they had some economists who advised them that economy-wide competition law was sufficient and their competition authority could do the job. For ten years companies, including a company called Clear Communications, which at that time was partly owned by Bell Canada and MCI, tried to get interconnection with Telecom New Zealand. After ten years of fighting in the courts and going to the competition regulator, they were unable to achieve interconnection.
Finally, the government said enough is enough; we want to see some real competition in this country. So they established a new office of the telecommunications commissioner within their commerce department. They selected a very good man, Doug Webb, who became the first commissioner. He essentially became the telecom commissioner, and since then competition has started to develop.