One Hundred Years After AT&T's Kingsbury Commitment, Benton Calls for a New Network Compact

[Commentary] On December 19, 1913, AT&T Vice President Nathan Kingsbury sent a letter to US Attorney General George McReynolds in hopes of putting AT&T’s business practices “beyond fair criticism” of anticompetitive behavior. In the letter, AT&T promised to sell its stake in Western Union Telegraph, resolve interconnection disputes, and refrain from acquisitions if the Interstate Commerce Commission objected. The letter became known as the “Kingsbury Commitment”. One hundred years later, AT&T and other landline telephone carriers seeks to retire the copper-based phone system. But the nation cannot retire the commitment Attorney General McReynolds understood to create “full opportunity throughout the country for competition in the transmission of intelligence by wire.” Given shrinking wireline telephone subscribership, incumbent telecommunications companies and their supporters say it makes no sense for them to sink more dollars into “legacy” phone networks when the future is in Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure. Of late, much attention has been focused on a petition filed last year by AT&T that asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to move forward on what’s being called the IP transition. The FCC is now in the beginning stages of what will be a years-long process to improve the nation’s infrastructure to better suit America’s 21st century communications needs. Eventually, all telecommunications infrastructure likely will be IP-based. And few doubt that the IP infrastructure of the future is the better technology and the better path for the U.S. in the long run. But what will become of the tens of millions of Americans who already face hurdles in accessing existing telephone and broadband networks? How can we ensure them easy and affordable access to future networks?