The '96 Act and the Internet: The Myth of the Consensus Light-Touch

[Commentary] Many hold the common but mistaken view that the successful Clintonera telecommunications/Internet policies reflected a bipartisan consensus that light-touch regulation was all that was necessary for the Internet to thrive. True, communications policy was more bipartisan in those days. That derived, however, not from a lack of controversy but from how that era’s great policy divide—between Local and the Long-Distance Phone Companies—had advocates on both sides of the aisle. The bigger error, however, lies in the myth that all the Internet needed was the benign neglect of the government.

A more accurate assessment is that the nascent Internet needed government assistance, just as did the nascent broadcast industry (with spectrum allocations and various protections for local broadcasters), the nascent cable industry (with mandated access to broadcast programming and pole attachment rights), and the nascent direct broadcast satellite industry (with spectrum and cable program access rights) all required in their early stages.

[Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution]