Soon, America will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That year is a distant memory for those in the communications technology world. But thanks to recent discourse, many question whether there will even be another anniversary for the 1996 law.
In 1996, the Internet was in its infancy, and so too were wireless services. As for social media, forget Twitter or TikTok; MySpace and even AOL Instant Messenger were but glimmers in their founders’ eyes. Users searched the Web via Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite, not Google. Current titans of industry—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and so on—either did not exist or were much smaller players compared to today. Their growth and that of the American economy is in no small part a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which opened communications markets to competition that had previously been proscribed.
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