100th Anniversary of the Kingsbury Commitment

[Commentary] In honor of its 100th anniversary, it is worth pausing to remember how the Kingsbury Commitment set a national goal to ensure interconnection and provide at least basic telephone service to all Americans.

Our country has not wavered from that fundamental commitment since. As we now move into new IP-based phone networks and communications infrastructure, we must hold fast to this commitment to make sure no one is left behind in the phone network transition. Through smart policy decisions guided by the basic principles of interconnection, service to everyone, and consumer protection (which Public Knowledge has paired with network reliability and public safety in our Five Fundamentals framework), our government seized the opportunity to create a telecommunications infrastructure that became the envy of the world. The story of the Kingsbury Commitment shows us that the core public interest features of our current network are not inherent physical characteristics of the materials used to build the networks or the protocols used on them, but rather are the result of policy decisions and rules that established the minimum public interest protections that society expected from carriers. The Kingsbury Commitment's anniversary reminds us that the success of our communications networks depends on our commitment to certain fundamentals public interest values. As we move forward into new technologies, these lessons do not change and our reliance on those values should remain.