Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjf6KICFcKI
Jonathan Nuechterlein (Nonresident Senior Fellow, TPI, and Distinguished Scholar, George Washington University) and Howard Shelanski (Sheehy Professor of Law, Georgetown University, and Partner, Davis Polk and Wardwell) discuss the new third edition of their book Digital Crossroads, the standard text on US telecommunications regulation. Moderated by Phil Weiser, Attorney General of Colorado, the Democratic nominee for governor, and co-author of the book’s first two editions.
Thirty years after the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the authors’ conclude that competition, not regulation, settled most of the fights the book discussed. A decade of unbundling litigation produced little, and what actually produced competition was mobile and broadband, technologies that arrived from outside the regulatory framework.
That matters beyond telecom because the remedies often proposed for large technology platforms are the 1996 Act’s remedies under new names. Interconnection has become interoperability, unbundled network elements have become data sharing, and number portability has become data portability. The economics driving both are the same, meaning network effects, scale economies and switching costs.
Top takeaways
- Jonathan Nuechterlein explained how competition settled the disputes that filled the first two editions. Wireline telecom is now a history chapter, while spectrum policy, universal service, and digital equity remain live and contested.
- Howard Shelanski put it more sharply, arguing that a decade of unbundling litigation preceded the realization that “competition wasn’t going to come from regulatory intervention. It was going to come from technological alternatives,” meaning mobile and broadband. He applied the same lesson to AI, noting that commercial self-interest produced internet backbone peering without any interconnection mandate, so the case for rules should wait until the use cases are clear.
- Phil Weiser offered a qualified defense of the Act against its critics, granting that local wireline competition never materialized but arguing that the statute pointed policy toward competition and helped wireless and broadband develop, which he counted as the more consequential outcome.
