The U.S. took on telecom deregulation starting...
The U.S. took on telecom deregulation starting in the 1970s based on a single recognition: “We think this market can be competitive and the country would benefit from it,” said former T-Mobile Senior Vice President Tom Sugrue in an interview.…
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“We were basically as a country the first one to do it. It’s not like we could point to a lot of examples around the world. It was a combination of antitrust policy and regulatory policy.” Sugrue, former FCC Wireless Bureau chief and deputy administrator at NTIA, retired Friday after 11 years as head of the carrier’s Washington office. He looked back at his decades in Washington in an interview last week. “Deregulating things that can be deregulated and promoting the conditions for competition have been the consistent theme since I first got involved in the late 1970s,” he said. Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt used to say the FCC should promote “too much competition” with “lots and lots of providers,” Sugrue said. He noted that when he joined T-Mobile there were six national wireless carriers. There has also been the expectation that “things would shake out” but it was better to start with “too many rather than too few,” he said. For wireless, Sugrue said, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 was really more important than the Telecom Act, which followed three years later. “The ‘93 act gave the commission auction authority, it directed the commission to make more spectrum available,” he said. Sugrue said if Congress takes on comprehensive telecom legislation it should learn from the mistakes of the past. “Everyone was trying to get a lot of detail into the [Telecom Act] to advantage them,” he said. “The bill got laden down with a lot of, I thought, unnecessary specificity.” The most important and longest lasting part of the bill ran about a sentence and said “no one can be prevented from offering any telecom service in the United States,” he said. “Back before that act, we had all sorts of prohibitions. Cable companies couldn’t offer telephone service, telephone companies couldn’t offer cable service, Bell companies couldn’t offer long distance. … The market was sort of balkanized like that.” Sugrue said when he came to Washington, the communications bar was not well regarded. “A lot of work was just grinding out” license renewal filings, he said. “That has changed.” Sugrue said he first got hired at the FCC following the breakup of AT&T when the Baby Bells were putting together their D.C. offices. “There was a huge brain drain out of the FCC at the senior level,” he said.