Corporate Friends

Chris Bowers describes the 1996 Telecommunications Act as “a very corporate friendly piece of legislation.” But the thing of it is that when it comes to that kind of telecom regulation bill, any legislation is going to be corporate friendly. That’s because what you have in the telecom marketplace is a bunch of corporations competing against a bunch of other corporations. These aren’t union-management disputes. For example, the 1996 Act has proven very friendly to the interests of what were formerly local telephone companies. But at the same time, it’s proven very unfriendly to the interests of what were formerly long distance companies. You can see that as AT&T, a former giant of the corporate world, wound up getting swallowed by SBC, formerly a lowly regional local phone company (confusingly, SBC then changed its name to AT&T).

Something I’m interested in now has to do with the future of spectrum policy as it relates to wireless phone and internet service. Here, again, pretty much whatever you do is going to be beneficial to some corporations because it’s for profit companies that provide cell phone and wireless broadband internet service. The issue is whether the rules will be friendly to the leading incumbents such as Verizon or whether the rules will be structured so as to provide for more rigorous competition. Again, during net neutrality battles we’ve seen big companies on both sides of the dispute. That’s just the nature of the issue. And to decide which side is right, you need to peer into the merits of the argument, not just say that what’s good for (some) businesses must be bad for the country — the whole area is a big clash between different businesses.