Bridging between the regional degree and the community approaches to rurality—A suggestion for a definition of rurality for everyday use

The territorial approach to rural development highlights the role of local actors, networks, culture, nature and landscape amenities. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) definition of rurality is, however, not capable of dealing with local and community definitions of rurality, which vary from study to study. In everyday life, physical planners, rural policymakers and local rural actors need a consistent definition of rurality. The reason is that structural reforms have led to larger administrative units that have less experience-based knowledge about the individual rural communities within a municipality than do local authorities. In this article, we propose a consistent definition of rurality that is easy for physical planners, rural policy makers and local rural actors to understand and apply in everyday use. In addition, our definition will be able to deal with both the regional and the community approach to rurality. This definition is based on an interdisciplinary literature review that starts with land cover and geographical mapping. The definition is then applied to the case of Denmark.     

Rail infrastructure charging and on-track competition in Germany

Germany was one of the pioneers amongst the European railways in opening up the network for third party access and introducing track access charging schemes. Several rail companies run services on the tracks of the incumbent company DB. This paper analyses the rules for network access, the track access charging scheme and the problems of competition in the rail market. The focus is on regional rail passenger transport due to the fact that this is the most lucrative and promising market for new entrants. The main result is that in this segment in particular non-DB companies have increasingly used the chances which were opened by (paid) access to DB tracks and competitive tendering by regional authorities. However, although their market share has grown DB is still the major carrier. The failure to set an appropriate institutional and regulatory framework has proven to be the major obstacle to a more intensive competition in the rail market.     

Flexible Geschäftsmodelle in der Telekommunikation und die Netzneutralitätsdebatte

The net neutrality debate concerns the differential treatment of data on the Internet and the pricing models used by enduser internet service providers (IPSs). In particular, end-user ISPs may want to prioritize certain services and charge on the sender or the receiver side for this activity. In the policy debate it is asked whether regulatory intervention is warranted to restrict such behavior. The introduction of new end-user tariffs for fixed-line Internet access by Deutsche Telekom has heated up the debate in Germany. At the national level, the German Ministry of Economics and Technology has prepared a draft regulation on net neutrality, which aims at limiting the differential treatment of data transmission on the internet including the access networks and, thus, to protect the “Open Internet”. The European Commission has prepared an alternative draft regulation for a single European market in telecommunications, which contains provisions for an “Open Internet”. In this article, the authors investigate the extent to which the new tariff structure by Deutsche Telekom relates to the net neutrality debate. They also provide a first critical analysis of the proposals by the German Ministry of Economics and Technology and the European Commission.