The last time that Congress enacted major telecommunications regulation reform, in 1996, the state of technology was very different than it is today: Fewer than 15% of Americans had a mobile phone, under one-third of U.S. households were online, and virtually all of those that were online had only slow, dial-up connections. Amazon.com and eBay were small startups (both were launched in 1995), and Mark Zuckerberg was still living at home with his parents, preparing for his bar mitzvah.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act focused primarily on increasing competition in the telephone industry, mainly by allowing local and long-distance providers to compete with one another. It had little to say about the Internet (the word “payphone” appears in the legislation more often than the word “Internet”), and it made no mention at all of wireless telephony. And the law left largely unchanged the basic structure of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and of communications regulation — which had been put in place with the first telecom law in 1934.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…