Summary
Telecommunications Act of 1996: Ten Years Later Symposium
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Extract
The greatest story never told: how the 1996 Telecommunications Act helped to transform cable's future.
It'll be 10-to-1 in our favor. I would say that by 2000, we'll have 50 percent of the cable TV business--no doubt about it, which is why some cable companies are in a panic. Meanwhile, the cable companies won't have even 3 percent of telephony revenues in their best market. Not in their best market. It's just not going to happen. (1)
Those were the words of the chief operating officer of Bell Atlantic, Ray Smith, as reported in Wired Magazine, February 1995. And those words prove yet again the wisdom of the famous Yogi Berra quote: "The hardest thing to predict is the future." Of course, predicting the future is exactly the task that the United States Congress took on when it fashioned, and ultimately passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ("1996 Act"). Congress thought that the new Act would pave the way for facilities-based competition in local telephone service, and that by breaking down the legal barriers to entry by phone companies into the cable television marketplace, it would also stimulate more facilities-based compet...See the full content of this document
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