Will the Telecommunications Act get a much-needed update as it turns 21?

Feb 08

Two decades is a long time in the world of technology, and telecom is vastly different today than it was then.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 turns 21 this year — today, in fact. Signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Feb. 8, 1996, it was the first major revision of telecommunications regulation since the passage of the original Communications Act of 1934, which established the Federal Communications Commission and gave it jurisdiction over broadcasting and telephony.

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Finally, the internet itself was very different in 1996: Amazon.com was barely a year old and was just an online bookstore. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still graduate students at Stanford working on a project that would become Google. Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old and in junior high school. Concepts such as cloud computing, self-driving cars or the Internet of Things existed only in the realm of science fiction.