Editor's note.

• Author: Butler, Carl W.

Welcome to the first issue of Volume 56 of the Federal Communications Law Journal. The staff is excited about this issue's broad range of topics, including local telephone service regulation, political advertising on broadcast television stations, mergers and acquisitions, cellular phone regulation, and advertising on public access channels.

In the first Article, Stuart Buck analyses, as a takings issue, the telephone company's struggle to meet its requirements under the TELRIC structure. In the second Article, Andrew D. Cotlar asserts that Wisconsin's recent legislation, which requires state-chartered public broadcasting television networks to carry political advertising for candidates free of charge, is damaging as an infringement on the principles of public broadcasting and dangerous if the principle and approach behind it are adopted by other states. In the third Article, Calvin S. Goldman, Q.C., Michael E. Piaskoski, and Ilene Knable Gotts review recent merger and acquisition activity and how the decisions to allow or deny "M&A" are viewed by regulatory agencies in the United States, the European Union, and Canada. In the fourth Article, Thomas W. Hazlett reviews cellular regulatory experiments and concludes that federal regulation is most appropriate and efficient. He fears that further state regulation of the cellular telephony could lead to undesirable balkanization of the industry.

In the note, Thomas Werner, a student at Indiana University-Bloomington School of Law, urges...