I was recently reading some older regulations related to copper, and this reminded me how regulation was used for many years to shape competition, or to be more precise, regulation was used to protect monopoly providers from competition. It got me to ask the question if regulation is still doing the same thing.

Telephone and related services were heavily regulated since the early days. Some states regulated telephone service as early as the 1870s, at a time when some cities saw a mad confusion of competitive copper wires being constructed like the picture on this blog in downtown Pratt, Kansas. Federal regulation of telephone began with the Mann-Elkins Act in 1910, which classified telephone companies as common carriers. In the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment, AT&T agreed to interconnect with independent telephone companies. In 1934, the Communications Act of 1934 moved telephone regulation into the newly formed FCC. States regulated telephone rates until the early part of this century, when most states backed out of the ratemaking role. The FCC and states together regulated massive parts of the telephone industry, and some of those regulations remain, but are dying with the dismemberment of copper networks. Telephone regulation is fading away with the death of copper networks. VoIP has largely been deregulated for years, although a few grant programs have required grant recipients to offer voice.

Cable companies began to be built in the 1960s and 1970s and were largely unregulated at first. Many cities and some states regulated cable companies through franchise agreements in order to stop a profusion of cable companies trying to get into the rights-of-way. The federal government stepped into cable regulation in 1984 with the Cable Communications Policy Act that explicitly recognized the authority of local governments to manage cable franchises and solidified cable companies as exclusive monopolies.

There is a lot of sentiment to deregulate cable companies to put them on the same footing with streaming providers. Cable companies would love to get out of regulations that force them to always carry local broadcast TV stations. Cable companies would really like to demolish the standard where they pay hefty franchise fees to use local rights-of-way that are greater than other users of the same facilities. It’s likely that cable regulations will eventually die as the percentage of the people who buy linear cable TV continues to decrease.

Broadband has only ever been saddled with minor regulation, although you would think they are regulated heavily by listening to the biggest ISPs. There has never been any attempt to regulate rates, although there are regulations related to consumer billing rights, privacy, and things like broadband labels.

So what’s left? Cell carriers are not heavily regulated outside of the rules that define how they can use any particular slice of spectrum. There are minor regulations related to consumer protection, and public safety considerations like Kari’s Law. The cell carriers didn’t need any regulatory approval to launch the massive FWA home broadband business, and just started to do it without any FCC approval.

Satellite companies are regulated in terms of the orbits they are allowed to use and the frequencies they can use to communicate between satellites and Earth. But there is very little regulation of the broadband products they offer, and the FCC and the Space Bureau have recently blessed using satellites for direct-to-device cellular service.

The one interesting place where regulation still rears its head is in the way that federal agencies decide how to spend federal broadband funds. The act of picking winners and losers took a serious turn when NTIA declared that satellite broadband was equivalent to terrestrial broadband. Declaring satellite to be equivalent to terrestrial technologies is a convenient way for NTIA to brag that they have finally solved the rural digital divide. NTIA has also decided that any electric cooperative that wants BEAD funding must submit to FCC pole attachment rules, A move in the opposite direction from light-touch regulation.

After thinking about it, I conclude that other than in the world of grants, there is almost no effective regulation in place today that favors one technology over another. Folks in the industry tend to focus on programs like BEAD that get a lot of press but forget that the locations covered by BEAD are a tiny fraction of the total homes in the country. For everything other than grant-funded networks, the trend seems to be toward reduced regulation over time.