Telecom Act At 20: Forgotten Origin Story For Facebook, Google, Netflix?

[Commentary] Former Vice President Al Gore got a bum rap for claiming to have invented the Internet (he never did). Yet ironically, when today we legitimately wonder whether government can do much of anything right, the passage twenty years ago of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 actually did help to lay the foundation for the extraordinary digital innovation in the last twenty years. It wasn’t democratic socialism, but a far more pragmatic brand of legislating that made it happen.

Fundamentally, the Act shifted the center of gravity in federal communications policy from a 60-year history of monopoly-based regulation to one based on the need for competition. The Act permitted competition in the cable business and the telephone business, in both local and long-distance (yes, kids, that was actually a thing at one time). It defined the nascent broadband access business as a lighter touch information-type service rather than an old-fashioned telephone service. You can label this investment as driven by fear of competition, greed or vision, but it wouldn’t have happened in a pre-Telecom Act world. And the U.S. shift to a pro-competition model led much of the world to follow suit, according to Larry Irving, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration (and my former colleague at the House Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee). That created not just a U.S. but a global infrastructure to facilitate the digital innovation to come.

[Homonoff is a Senior Vice President and member of the leadership team at MediaLink]