Freeing Cities From Telco and Cable Monopolies

In the early 1970s I was part of an administration that helped break up AT&T ... because AT&T had become an impediment to the development and nurturing of a new knowledge-based economy and society.

John M. Eger, of San Diego State University is the Executive Director of the International Center for Communications, and president of the World Foundation for Smart Communities. Eger headed CBS Broadcast International which he established, and was senior vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group. From 1971-1973, he was legal assistant to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and from 1974-1976 served as telecommunications advisor to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and was director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy. Eger opened the California Broadband Roundtable on March 15 in San Jose with this presentation:

I believe broadband today is as important as waterways, railways and highways were in an earlier era. Unfortunately, this concern, indeed urgency, is not widely held. From a policy standpoint, clearly, at the federal, state and local level, we have lost our way, much to our peril.

In the early 1970s I was part of an administration that helped break up AT&T -- not because they didn't have the finest telephone system in the world, they did, but because AT&T had become an impediment to the development and nurturing of a new knowledge-based economy and society.

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but in the 60' and even the 1970s, AT&T didn't allow French phones to be connected to its network. Such attachments, they argued, would destroy the finest telephone system in the world. It took many years of regulatory reform -- not to mention billions of dollars in litigation -- to get those French phones attached to the network to create the first specialized common carrier, known as MCI, and to give birth to teleprocessing to connect computers to the network and help usher in the modern-day Internet.

Clearly we were ahead of the pack. Most countries had not yet deregulated or privatized their postal telephone and telegraph companies, or PTTs as they were known. In 1996, as you recall, we ushered in what was considered to be landmark telecommunications reform with the telecom act of that year that opened the regulatory floodgates to new entry.

Wall Street quickly followed by opening its wallets to any business plan that had the word Internet attached to it. As we know now, after just a few short years, and some two trillion dollars -- more than it cost to build the interstate highway system -- most of the new competition went bankrupt, or simply died trying to find an opening.

COVAD -- one of the new broadband local exchange carriers, as they were called -- said it died of a thousand cuts, referring to the difficulties they had getting the Baby Bells to sublease their facilities; a critical first step to competing in the marketplace for new information services.

Today, according to the ITU or the OECD in Paris, we're either 13th or 15th, depending on how you interpret the report in deploying broadband communications. Smaller countries like Korea, Singapore or Japan, are leading the world by offering broadband [much faster] and at a fraction of the cost.

Even in the Middle East, tiny Dubai -- which we've heard a lot about recently -- boasts the largest Internet facility in the world, which they practically give away as in incentive to the multi-national and global companies as an enticement to headquarter their Middle East/North Africa [operations] there.

The telcos, and now the cable companies, are clearly fighting for leadership as America's next monopoly to dominate all telecommunications. If Ed