George H.W. Bush’s legacy on tech & telecom

George H.W. Bush was president before the iPhone, before Netflix, before Facebook. But his imprint was felt on the telecom and nascent tech sectors. “I think the most consequential part of that period would be the leadership in transitioning from analog to digital technologies,” said Al Sikes, who served as Federal Communications Commission chairman under Bush from 1989 to 1993. “We were an all-analog world except for the computer sector.” Sikes counts carving out spectrum for emerging technologies, such as mobile digital devices, as one of the Bush administration’s key tech achievements. On matters of telecom regulation, President Bush favored “a light hand,” Sikes said, a philosophy evident in his veto of the 1992 Cable Act. The House and Senate later overrode the veto. The law required cable operators to carry local broadcast channels without charge and allowed for broadcasters to collect retransmission fees on content. “I can recall meeting with the president who pretty much in what I would call a conservative vein talked about the need to talk about opportunities, not regulating the past,” Sikes said of Bush’s thinking. Andrew Schwartzman, the Benton Senior counselor at Georgetown University, said the Bush-era FCC “largely continued the deregulatory policies” of the Reagan administration.

Current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai offered up his own take on Bush’s “light hand” approach during an International Institute of Communicators forum. “In my view, regulators in the communications space would be well-served by President Bush’s prudence,” Chairman Pai said. “That means being skeptical toward preemptive regulation of new technologies — rules that try to predict market failures before they occur. Not gonna do it.” Microsoft President Brad Smith paid homage to Bush’s “thousand points of light” phrase — a message on volunteerism and nonprofit work in the U.S. — tying it to the tech giant’s Airband initiative to deliver wireless broadband to rural America.