Communication cleanup: a freedom of information act.

• Author: Huber, Peter

The cost of processing and conveying information will consume a steadily growing fraction of every budget, private and public, for the rest of our lives, and quite possibly for the rest of American history. Manufacturing, transportation, energy, finance, education, medical care--the prosperity of almost every sector of the economy will hinge on telecommunications and information processing. Growing the information economy will be as critical to our national wealth as maintaining a stable currency. In fact, currency itself--which is no more than a primitive medium of communication--is fast giving way to newer, more private forms of data bases and electronic communication. Reed Hundt, chairman of the FCC, may be as important to our future as Alan Greenspan. All this means that getting telecom policy right is transcendently important.

But what's right? Telecom jurisdiction today is divided higgledy-piggledy among the Federal Communications Commission and countless state regulators. The Department of Justice and Judge Harold Greene, who still police the 1984 decree that broke up Bell, have a large and independent slice of the legal action. These various regulators and litigators oversee interstate telephony and all of broadcast under laws written in 1927 and 1934, and a consent decree drafted in 1982. Cable is regulated under a pair of rubbishy statutes enacted hastily, and almost thoughtlessly, in 1984 and 1992. Satellite is regulated mostly by analogy to telephone and television. The copyright law most relevant to broadband telecom was cobbled together in a truly abominable piece of legislation passed in 1976.

The last Congress tried to fix the mess. It failed. In a classic exhibition of Washington at its overstaffed, overlobbied, constipated worst, proposals to deregulate gradually metamorphosed into proposals to regulate more than ever. Then they died merciful deaths. This was nothing new. Congress has been trying to pass a comprehensive new telecom law since 1981.

The Republicans are now promising action by Easter. They might consider this modest proposal (I don't really expect they will--this is a thought experiment): Write a new law that addresses only government, no one else. No new studies, rules, tariffs, or schedules. No new mandates, proscriptions, tribunals, boards, or commissions. A law, in short, that simply clears away an obsolete underbrush of law itself. It's what the industry most urgently needs.

Entry. Monopoly is indeed a...