The good news is that the new Telecommunications Act of 1996 creates the possibility for pushing a Progressive agenda. The act rejects the old paradigm of encouraging monopolies or oligopolies as the best market structures to deliver universal and high quality communications services, such as telephony or video. That old paradigm led some to say with justice that the FCC, as the erstwhile regulator of these monopolies, had come to stand for Firmly Captured by Corporations. Now if the FCC passes rules that open all communications markets to competition, we will kickstart billions of dollars of new investment, creating more than three million jobs. Another part of our competition policy ought to be the expansion of our auction authority.
Auctions are the best way to jumpstart competition.
They get licenses out fast to businesses who have the right incentive rapidly to offer new services to the public. A progressive policy for communications is based also on a sanguine stipulation to Samuel Johnson's famous statement that there are few things a man can do that are more innocent than making money. The analogy is wrong. We don't need a Federal Computer Commission because in fact the computer industry was never a state-authorized monopoly, because new entry is common, and because we don't need a national policy of making computers affordable to everyone in their home by subsidizing their prices. But communications markets are intensely concentrated, as a result of five decades of pro-monopoly laws, and the scale of investment for competition in these markets is in the hundreds of billions.