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Common Carriage Obligation

Public-service obligation — instantiates Bottleneck Power Governance

Binds a provider that holds itself out to the public to serve all eligible comers indifferently, at just and reasonable rates, without undue discrimination.

A Common Carriage Obligation binds a provider that offers its service to the public to carry all eligible users on like terms — indifferently, at just and reasonable rates and quality, without undue discrimination. Its defining move is to govern the manner of treatment once access exists, rather than whether access must be granted. Where the essential-facility rule asks must you let this rival in, common carriage asks now that you serve the public, may you treat some worse than others — and answers no. It is a status-based duty: hold yourself out as a carrier and the obligation attaches, without a fresh market-power case for each user.

Example

A broadband carrier is the only fixed connection available to a neighborhood. Left unconstrained it could throttle a streaming service that competes with its own bundle, or charge an online store a fee for "priority" delivery of its packets while everyone else's slows. Under a common carriage obligation the carrier must move all lawful traffic on comparable terms: no blocking or throttling a competing service, no paid prioritization that degrades others, published and reasonable pricing, and a service quality it cannot arbitrarily degrade. The lineage here is the old common-carrier duty to serve the public on "just, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms.[1]

The carrier keeps operating the network and earning its return — but loses the lever of quietly favoring some traffic, especially its own, over rivals'. The captive user's paper connection becomes usable participation.

How it works

  • Attach the duty by status. Holding out to serve the public triggers it — no case-by-case market proof for each user, unlike the essential-facility gate.
  • Forbid undue discrimination among like users. Including self-preferencing of the carrier's own downstream service against rivals it also carries.
  • Require just and reasonable rates and terms. Published, comparable, not extortionate — so access is affordable, not merely available.
  • Bar quality degradation as backdoor denial. Throttling, deprioritization, and "sabotage by service" are treated as refusals in disguise.

Tuning parameters

  • "Like user" definition — how finely users are classed; too fine lets the carrier gerrymander discriminatory tiers, too coarse forbids legitimate differentiation.
  • Reasonable-rate standard — cost-based, market-based, or merely "not unjust"; tighter standards curb extraction but invite rate litigation.
  • Permitted differentiation — which distinctions are allowed (volume, genuine cost-to-serve) versus forbidden (identity, rivalry).
  • Quality floor — the minimum, non-degradable level of service owed to all.
  • Scope of "holding out" — which offerings count as public carriage versus genuinely private, bespoke deals.

When it helps, and when it misleads

Its strength is simplicity: status-triggered, it needs no re-proof of market power for each user, and it directly blocks the two commonest chokepoint abuses — discriminating against rivals and gouging captive users. Its weaknesses are that "just and reasonable" is vague and litigable, that strict non-discrimination can forbid efficient price differentiation, and that a determined carrier degrades quality in ways hard to police. The classic misuse is a carrier relabeling a discriminatory tier as a neutral "service level" to launder self-preferencing. The discipline is to judge by the effect on like users rather than the label, and to pair the rate duty with a non-degradable quality floor.[1]

How it implements the components

  • price_quality_and_service_constraint — it sets the just-and-reasonable rate and the non-degradable quality floor that turn a paper right of access into usable service.
  • non_discrimination_and_self_preferencing_rule — it forbids treating like users unlike, including the carrier favoring its own downstream arm.

It governs how users are treated, not whether a reluctant controller must admit a rival at all — that threshold duty is Essential Facility Access Rule. Structural enforcement of the self-preferencing ban against an affiliate is Self-Preferencing Firewall's, and deep rate-base scrutiny belongs to Price-Cap or Rate Review.

  • Instantiates: Bottleneck Power Governance — the duty that keeps a public-facing bottleneck usable and even-handed once access exists.
  • Consumes: Market-Power Screen — imposed where the screen shows users are genuinely captive rather than free to switch.
  • Sibling mechanisms: Essential Facility Access Rule · Market-Power Screen · Non-Discrimination Access Tariff · Self-Preferencing Firewall · Price-Cap or Rate Review · Universal Service Obligation · Open Access Mandate

Notes

Common carriage is the broad duty; a Non-Discrimination Access Tariff is one instrument that implements part of it (a published, equal-terms price schedule). Keep the pairing in mind: the obligation states the principle, the tariff and a quality floor make it checkable, and without the quality floor a carrier can honor the price rule while degrading the service into uselessness.

References

[1] The duty of a common carrier to serve the public at "just, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms runs from the common-law carrier through, for example, telecommunications carriers under Title II of the US Communications Act. Referenced as the lineage of the obligation, not as a claim about any current regulatory classification, which has shifted over time. ↩