ABSTRACT
The future of telecommunications policy in the United States has become wrapped up in one piece of legislation: the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The passage of the Act represents, in some ways, a significant change in the way telecommunications networks are talked about in the US This chapter provides a brief overview of the development of the telecommunications sector in the United States. It focuses on the regulatory and structural characteristics critical to our comparative analysis of the various telecommunications infrastructures. Even with the passage of the Act, the corporate strategies that have been pronounced by American telecommunications and information companies over the last 5 years all boil down to one basic statement: Each company wants to own its own platform and invest in the value of that platform.
