Claims Made in Opposition To The Act
When the smaller CLECs faced financial problems, the trend toward competition slowed, turning into a decade of reconsolidation. The two largest CLECs, Teleport Communications Group (TCG) and Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) were acquired by AT&T and MCI/WorldCom.
Looking back five years after the bill, the Consumers Union reported that wire to wire competition, the reason that sold the bill, had not succeeded as legislators had hoped. CLECs had captured just under seven percent of total lines in the country, and only three percent of homes and small businesses. Wire to wire competition only accounted for one percent of total lines nationwide.
The Consumers Union also raises one other major point. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 did not foster competition among ILECs as the bill had hoped. Instead, of ILECs encroaching on each other, the opposite occurred - mergers. Before the 1996 Act was passed, the largest four ILECs owned less than half of all the lines in the country while five years later the largest four local telephone companies own about 85% of all the lines in the country.
Robert Crandall has argued that the forced-access provisions of the 1996 Act have had little economic value, and the primary, sustainable competitive forces in phone and related, non-'radio', telecommunications are the wireline telephone companies, the cable companies, and the wireless companies.
The Act was claimed to foster competition. Instead, it continued the historic industry consolidation reducing the number of major media companies from around 50 in 1983 to 10 in 1996 and 6 in 2005. An FCC study found that the Act had led to a drastic decline in the number of radio station owners, even as the actual number of commercial stations in the United States had increased.
Consumer activist Ralph Nader argued the act was an example of corporate welfare spawned by political corruption, because it gave away to incumbent broadcasters valuable licenses for broadcasting digital signals on the public airwaves. There was a requirement in the act that the FCC not auction off the public spectrum which the FCC itself valued at $11–$70 billion.
Read more about this topic: Telecommunications Act Of 1996
Famous quotes containing the words claims, opposition and/or act:
“Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be an injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord’s or a banker’s?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)