20th Anniversary of the 1996 Telecom Act: Let’s get back on track.

[Commentary] In honor of its anniversary, let’s take stock of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, how the communications ecosystem has performed in its wake, and whether the Federal Communications Commission has done its job to uphold it.

The goal of the act was to “promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services for American telecommunications consumers and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies” (emphasis added.) With regard to the Internet, it noted that the policy of the United States is “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation” (emphasis added.) The development of the Internet since the 1996 act has been an unqualified success.

[Layton studies Internet economics at the Center for Communication, Media, and Information Technologies (CMI) at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark]