As they consider revisiting the landmark 1996 Telecommunications Act, Congress should use as its guiding principle the old medical maxim: "First, do no harm."
Since passage of the 1996 Telecom Act, consumers and innovators have made huge and historic strides. Congress should remember that back in 1996, they wisely put consumers in the driver’s seat, and telecommunications firms rushed in, catering to their needs, and even their whims.
Now, we’ve got ready access to compact mobile phones with voice, video, and text messaging. Not your style? Well, there’s also a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) out there for you that combines a mobile phone, email, and an Internet browser all in one small device. In our homes, we’ve got video services that bring us nearly 1,000 video and music channels in digital and even high-definition formats. We have high-speed Internet connections that make the dial-up connections of just a few years ago seem like stone-age technology today. We have IPods capable of storing 1,000 songs on a device the size of a business-card holder. We’ve got low-cost long-distance carriers. And, we’ve got all these technologies rapidly converging to whatever form and whichever combination we, the consumers, demand.
Since the passage of the ’96 Act, the changes in our everyday lives and in our expectations for the future have been profound. And that has largely been due to the government’s staying out of the technology business. They laid down some general rules of how competition should work, and let the private sector invest, innovate and compete.
Had Congress tried to predict the unpredictable, had they tried to peer into the future – even in a sincere effort to “help” consumers – they would have done a great disservice to everyone involved, including consumers, workers, and entrepreneurs. Congress did the right thing in ’96, even though it might have seemed like a bold risk at the time.
Given their unprecedented success, you’d expect Congress to have learned an important lesson. They could hardly have clearer signals that the low-regulation environment and the clear rules of the road laid down for competitors in the ‘96 Act led to high productivity, high consumer satisfaction, and sustained consumer demand for innovation. Decreased regulation also led to increased American jobs and increased American competitiveness in the world.
Alas, that seemingly obvious lesson seems not to be so clear inside the Washington, DC Beltway. Early efforts to revisit the 1996 Telecom Act have ranged from special-interest carve-outs to misguided early drafts that seem more like new regulations than new freedom to innovate.
Adam Theirer, a telecommunications analyst at the free-market-oriented Progress and Freedom Foundation is worried about what’s happening in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Another bill, introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Albert Wynn (D-MD) in the House and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Gordon Smith (R-OR) in the Senate, would stunningly lift regulation for Bell telephone companies in the video-services market, but leave regulations in place for cable providers. Is tilting the playing field to favor one provider over another what made the 1996 Telecom Act work for consumers? Hardly. If Congress had engaged in these special-carve-out shenanigans ten years ago, they would have chosen the winners and the losers without giving consumers a chance to make those decisions on their own.
These are but two examples of why consumers and legislators alike should be extremely cautious about reopening the ’96 Act. Better to leave things as they are – clear invitations to compete and clear rules that apply to everyone equally – than to rush in and regulate away all our gains over the past ten years, or start some cynical process of playing political favorites.
Right now, consumers are in the driver’s seat. They have innovators competing for their business under a common set of competitive rules. Consumers above all should beware Washington DC’s efforts to pass “public-interest” regulations that aren’t in the public interest at all.
Government cannot predict the future now any better than they could ten years ago, so they shouldn’t try to favor one technology over another, no matter how well-intentioned. How should they know what consumers will be offered in three years, much less ten?
Nor should government try to play political favorites as does the Bell-inspired Blackburn bill. Consumers are not served when government usurps the consumers’ rights to pick the winners and losers in the marketplace.
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