Complete Story
02/09/2017
Will the Telecommunications Act get a much-needed update as it turns 21?
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 turns 21 this year — today, in fact. Signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Feb. 8, 1996, it was the first major revision of telecommunications regulation since the passage of the original Communications Act of 1934, which established the Federal Communications Commission and gave it jurisdiction over broadcasting and telephony.
To a large extent, the ’96 Act was an attempt to update the regulation of a telephone industry that had been fundamentally changed with the 1984 breakup of the old Bell system. Its main thrust was to move away from the regulation of monopolies and toward the encouragement of competition within the telephone industry. The Act had little to say either about the internet or wireless phones.
Of course, two decades is a long time in the world of technology, and telecom is vastly different today than it was then. In 1996, just 16 percent of Americans had mobile phones, which only supported voice communications, with simple text messaging just beginning to appear. Apple’s iPhone, which kicked off the smartphone era in 2007, was still a decade away.
Additionally, less than one-fifth of U.S. households in 1996 were connected to the internet, all of them via dial-up modems with a maximum speed of 33.6 Kbps. It was not until 2004 that the number of homes with broadband exceeded the number of homes with narrowband connections.
Finally, the internet itself was very different in 1996: Amazon.com was barely a year old and was just an online bookstore. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still graduate students at Stanford working on a project that would become Google. Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old and in junior high school. Concepts such as cloud computing, self-driving cars or the Internet of Things existed only in the realm of science fiction.
