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# Innovation and Competition Anchor America's 150 Year Experiment with Telecommunications
- URL: https://broadbandbreakfast.com/innovation-and-competition-anchor-americas-150-year-experiment-with-telecommunications/
- Published: 2026-10-01T03:44:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T03:44:58.000Z
- Description: Necessity may be the mother of invention, but who’s the father of competition?
- Author: Drew Clark
- Tags: Telecom 150, #no-ads, #no-flux, Deb Fischer

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30, 2026 – As this anniversary year enters its final quarter tomorrow, Broadband Breakfast takes stock of “[250 Years of American Independence and 150 Years of American Telecommunications](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/telecom150/).”

That’s the title of the online conference, hosted at 12 Noon ET October 1 for Broadband Breakfast Club Members. Sign up to join the Breakfast Club and attend.

[![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/29/97/29976d9d-89ea-4c77-8c0b-0e8a0eafed35/content/images/2026/09/gilbert-banner-no-words-jpg-2.jpg)](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/telecom150/#bbb-offer) 

[***Sign Up for FREE for Section A of '150 Years of American Telecommunications'**](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/course/#bbb-offer)

[Sign up for FREE for Section A ](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/telecom150/#bbb-offer) 

You’ve heard a lot about this theme from us over the past four months, as we hosted three events, each covering a distinct 50-year arc of American communications history, in June and July.

### **June 17: 1876*–*1926, The Telephone and the Transatlantic Cable.**

[Read the article](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/telephones-rise-was-shaped-by-courts-and-lobbying-not-just-wires-historians-say/)

### **June 24: 1927–1976, Broadcasting, Cable and the Creation of the* Media*

[Read the article](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/from-the-beginning-politics-triggered-broadcasting/)

### *July 1: 1977–2026, Computing, the Internet and Artificial Intelligence*

[Read the article](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/the-internet-dispersed-power-the-supreme-court-is-concentrating-it/)

Then, in August, we released the first lessons of a 35-lesson course specifically devoted to “[150 Years of American Telecommunications](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/course/).”

[![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/29/97/29976d9d-89ea-4c77-8c0b-0e8a0eafed35/content/images/2026/08/course_banner_wordmark_notitle.jpeg)](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/course/#bbb-offer) 

[***Sign up for Free and Join Section A of the course**](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/course/#bbb-offer)***!**

[Sign up for Free! ](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/course/#bbb-offer) 

I previewed each of six sections in a special BroadbandLive session:

[Broadband Breakfast Course Traces 150 Years of American TelecommunicationsBroadband Breakfast CEO previews the 35-lesson course tracing American telecom from Bell’s patent to AI. The course launches Monday![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/29/97/29976d9d-89ea-4c77-8c0b-0e8a0eafed35/content/images/icon/291902499_377772294340770_1913533388107842851_n-4b61df90-0953-4b51-94e2-2daa249d88de.png)Broadband BreakfastBroadband Breakfast![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/29/97/29976d9d-89ea-4c77-8c0b-0e8a0eafed35/content/images/thumbnail/250150-course-graphic-1-4fe4b2c6-2c68-4a0a-a618-8a5e769fa342.png)](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/broadband-breakfast-course-traces-150-years-of-american-telecommunications/)

- ***Section A: An American Invention and an American Telecom Network***
- ***Section B: The New Deal for American Communications***
- ***Section C: Early Cable, Wireless and Satellite***
- ***Section D: The Internet***
- ***Section D: The Internet***
- ***Section F: Broadband and AI***

And we’ve been releasing these every Monday since then, and have now completed Section A and are half-way into Section B. The four lessons in Section A are available for free, to any member of the broadband community. The remaining 35 lessons are available, at no additional cost, to Breakfast Club Members.

### *Commemorating history and technology*

Now – tomorrow – our commemoration event comes together in an online event beginning at 12 Noon ET.

Sen. **Deb Fischer**, R-Neb., will offer keynote remarks to begin the celebration. Fischer, who serves as chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, focuses on America’s nuclear triad and associated delivery systems, the emergence of space as a warfighting domain, and defending the nation against increasingly sophisticated missile threats.

She’ll bring a unique perspective that the broadband community need to focus on. Fischer’s subcommittee directly oversees two unified combatant commands: U.S. Strategic Command, headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and U.S. Space Command.

But Fischer’s remarks are on the beginning of more than two-and-a-half hours of history-plus-technology.

Her remarks will be followed by three historical recaps: One for each of three periods covered in our early-summer BroadbandLive sessions.

Two of the presentations will be joined by the scholars who participated previously. **Claude Fischer**, distinguished professor of the Graduate School in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and who spoke on June 17, will speak to “The Telephone and the Telegraph.” He’ll be followed by **Thomas Hazlett,** with whom I have co-authored a law review article (with **Sarah Oh Lam**) on [the Fairness Doctrine, “spectrum scarcity” and public interest obligations](https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol9/iss3/1/?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com). Hazlett will reprise and build upon many of the points he made in our Jun 24 session on “Broadcasting, Cable and the Creation of the Media.”

The third historical recap will be focused on the last 50 years, the era of “Computing and the Internet,” and will be presented by **Christopher S. Yoo,** the Imasogie Professor in Law and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of its Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition.

### *Here’s the rest of the program*

- Noon–12:05 p.m. | Welcome: **Drew Clark**, CEO, Broadband Breakfast
- 12:05–12:20 p.m. | Keynote: Sen. **Deb Fischer**
- 12:20–12:35 p.m. | 1876–1926: The Telephone and the Telegraph: **Claude Fischer**
- 12:35–12:50 p.m. | 1927–1976: Broadcasting, Cable and the Creation of the Media: **Thomas Hazlett**
- 12:50–1:35 p.m. | Innovation: **Matt DelNero**, partner, Covington and Burling; **Shane Greenstein,** Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; and **Chris Lewis**, president and CEO, Public Knowledge.
- 1:35–1:50 p.m. | 1977–2026: Computing and the Internet: **Christopher Yoo**
- 1:50–2:35 p.m. | Competition: **Milton Mueller**, author of seven books, including *Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection, and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System,* as well as being the founder co-director of the Internet Governance Project; **Eli Noam**, Professor of Economics and Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Business Responsibility, emeritus, at Columbia University; **Jonathan Nuechterlein,** distinguished scholar at George Washington University’s Competition Law Center and who teaches antitrust and telecommunications law at Georgetown and the University of Virginia; and **Gigi Sohn**, Executive Director, American Association for Public Broadband; and the cofounder of Public Knowledge; as well as being senior fellow and public advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, and distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy

### *Innovation and Competition*

As we noted in [Lesson 1: The Telephone and the Telephone Network](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/lesson-1-the-telephone-and-the-telephone-network/), the Patent Office granted **Alexander Graham Bell’s** patent on March 7, 1876, three days before he transmitted speech in a Boston laboratory.

At a March 2026 ceremony marking 150 years on the occasion of Bell's patent, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director **John Squires**, also the under secretary of Commerce for intellectual property [called the event the first of the agency's programs](https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/news-updates/remarks-john-squires-150-years-alexander-graham-bells-telephone-patent?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com) for the nation's 250th, also noting that invention and independence share a birth year.

(The Patent Office, of course, is not the only entity intellectual property-promoting agency to make much of an anniversary year. The Copyright Office [last week celebrated](https://www.copyright.gov/events/copyright-act-50th-anniversary/?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com) the 50th Anniversary of the Copyright Act’s 1976 passage. And, of course, many telecom-and-tech focused entities have pondered 250 years of innovation – or the 30 years since the passage of the Telecom Act of 1976, including [AEI](https://www.aei.org/events/30-years-of-the-telecommunications-act-what-did-we-learn/?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com), the [Benton Institute](https://www.benton.org/event/telecom-act-30?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com), [Public Knowledge](https://publicknowledge.org/the-telecommunications-act-of-1996-at-30-an-analysis-of-policy-power-and-the-public-interest/?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com), the [Federal Communications Commission](https://www.fcc.gov/consumer-governmental-affairs/fcc-announces-2-events-commemorate-30th-anniversary-telecommunications-act-1996?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com), [Congress](https://www.congress.gov/event/119th-congress/house-event/119115?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com), and [Broadband Breakfast](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/they-came-not-to-bury-but-to-praise-the-telecom-act-of-1996/).)

### *Innovation was never enough, on its own*

While an American didn’t invent the telegraph, the telephone offered a technology that the United States commercialized and deployed far more than other nations. Invention alone was never enough. What built Bell's market was the breadth of that patent and the litigation that defended it.

Other forces besides innovation were equally true for **Edwin Armstrong‘s** invention of frequency modulation, the static-free FM broadcasting still in use – although its arrival was delayed by entrenched AM incumbents. **Philo Farnsworth** won the fundamental television patent but then lost the story to RCA's publicity machine under **David Sarnoff**, which crowned its own engineers at the 1939 World's Fair.

Each breakthrough traveled a similar road: A working invention, a fight over patent scope, and a verdict decided less by the lab than by who held the rights and the airwaves.

### *Competition was always the harder achievement*

But if, as the adage runs, “necessity is the mother of invention”, who then is the father of competition?

**Adam Smith** wrote that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” The butcher, the brewer and the baker are not necessarily in competition with each other. But it must needs be that when there is money to be made, competition will come!

Are telecommunication and technology – for all their innovative glory – destined to fall pray to “network effects” in which the first to consolidate gains market control? Competition in American communications has swung like a pendulum for these 150 years.

The telegraph consolidated first, as Western Union absorbed its rivals into a single national monopoly. The telephone traveled a rougher road. The Kingsbury Commitment of 1913, a deal AT&T struck with the government to head off antitrust action, promised competition yet left the company with roughly 98 percent of long-distance traffic.

And – [we discussed in Lesson 3](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/lesson-3-in-other-counties-ptts-posts-telegraph-and-telephone/) – Washington even tried public ownership. For one year, from 1918 to 1919, the Post Office ran the phone system. Most nations made that arrangement permanent, whereas the U.S. handed the wires back to private hands.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first law written for the Internet age – yet without mentioning the Internet – made the boldest attempt to open local networks to new entrants in the hope that rivals would bloom. Exactly 30 years later, the results are decidedly mixed.

These are among the themes that we’ll be discussing on Oct 1\. Join us for the full conversation!

## Register for the Online Event on October 1, 2026

Get 3 Months of Breakfast Club Membership! 

[Register for $150](#bbb-offer) 

###