Congress needs to update the Communications Act—quickly

A lot has happened during the past 20 years, particularly in the communications arena. The Internet was in its early stages, but many people still valued the regular-mail delivery of America Online (AOL) CD-ROMs even more—the movie You’ve Got Mail would not be released for another two years, around the same time that the first 56K modem was commercially available.

In the wireless world, the FCC had just conducted its first PCS auctions, enabling Sprint to become a player in the still-nascent market while using a new standard called code division multiple access (CDMA) that some in the wireless industry had questioned for decades as a practical protocol for a wireless network.

As cool as these new data and wireless technologies were, they were expensive and generally considered to be “luxuries” for those that had quite a bit of discretionary income. Wireline telephony still was the dominant form of communications.

It was during this time that Congress was putting the final touches on its last rewrite of the Communications Act, which helped usher in a new era of data services and mobility that have fueled the global economy and transformed the way we work, learn and play.

Today, half of the households in the U.S. do not even have a wireline phone, AOL has been forgotten by most, and wireless services are delivering amazing applications to myriad devices at speeds that would have seemed unimaginable 20 years ago. Meanwhile, the price points of the devices and services are so reasonable that we have more wireless devices in use than people on the planet.

Things are going to get even more complicated with innovations such as drones and the Internet of Things (IoT), which promises to introduce tens of billions of additional sensors/devices into the communications ecosystem during the next several years. Meanwhile, all of these innovations are built on software, which makes cybersecurity a priority for everyone, from individuals to enterprises and governments.

No one could have foreseen all of this 20 years ago, so it is not surprising that those rules written by Congress at the time—and they were pretty forward-thinking, given what was known in the mid-1990s—no longer fit what is happening in real world.

This fact was apparent repeatedly today as FCC commissioners testified before the Senate Commerce Committee. Whether the subject was 911, municipal broadband, or the regulation of broadband providers, the reality is that the rules written 20 years ago do not clearly delineate what level of government—local, state or federal—much less which exact entity has the authority to address issues that no one contemplated even a decade ago. In too many cases, FCC commissioners cannot agree whether they have the authority to take certain actions, much less come to a consensus on the proper policies.

As a result, we are in era where critical policies are being developed and implemented based on the interpretation of a court, not on thoughtful debate and planning about what is in the best social and financial interests of the country.