This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 3rd, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown. The Telecom Reform of the 1990s is broadly considered to be a success.

Trends for prices and quality of access to the internet are all moving the right direction.

So why is there such a strong push for change?

Larry Downs is an internet industry analyst and project director of the Georgetown Center

for Business and Public Policy's evolution of regulation. of the month. Describe to me the success that was the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

Right, so the 96 Act was a bipartisan piece of legislation during the Clinton administration that that deregulated much of the

telecom industry but more importantly set forward in motion the policy of the United

States that broadband technologies

internet technologies anything to do with digital or IP was going to be hands off as

much as possible not only for federal regulators like the FTC but also for states.

All right so what does that mean?

Yeah.

Well, what that's for the development of technology and the speed at which people are able to access the internet.

So I mean one thing that's meant is a trillion dollars in private investment that's

happened in the last decade alone largely because investors knew that they could do these things with a largely unregulated environment.

And so we have, by any measure you want to look at, we have the most fiber in the world, we have the most broadband lines, we have

the most consumers that are connected.

We obviously have, you know, eight of the ten most valuable internet companies in the world.

Another piece of the 96 Act was a section called Section 230. in the for websites, so if you post a website and somebody posts a comment, you can't be sued

for libel or for it or any other sort of thing.

All of those things together has meant that, you know, I think by any measure the United States

has become the champion of the

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