250 Years of American Independence & 150 Years of American Telecommunications
An in-person event on Thursday, October 1, 2026
Register for $250!Program for In-Person Event on October 1, 2026:
Panel 1: Innovation
This panel examines how past regulatory bargains shaped the technologies that followed, and weighs how to protect the permissionless innovation that built the modern internet while managing the risks each new tool introduces. It asks what 150 years of precedent suggests about governing what comes next.
- Tom Wheeler, Visiting Fellow, Brookings Institution; Former Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
Tom Wheeler served as the 31st chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from November 2013 to January 2017, where he led the agency’s adoption of net neutrality rules, consumer privacy protections, and stronger cybersecurity policy. He came to the job after decades working in the communications industry, running the National Cable Television Association from 1979 to 1984, the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association from 1992 to 2004, and later serving as a managing director at Core Capital Partners. He is now a visiting fellow at Brookings and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and remains the only person inducted into both the Cable Television Hall of Fame and the Wireless Hall of Fame.
Panel 2: Competition
This panel brings that history to bear on today's fights over broadband deployment, spectrum access, and the vast infrastructure now being built to power artificial intelligence. It asks whether the current buildout is opening the market to new entrants or consolidating it in fewer hands, and what a century and a half of competition policy suggests about the answer.
- Eli Noam, Director, Columbia Institute for Tele-Information
- Gigi Sohn, Executive Director, American Association for Public Broadband; Former Counselor to the Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
- Jonathan Nuechterlein, Distinguished Scholar, George Washington University Competition Law Center
Eli Noam is Professor of Economics and Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Business Responsibility, emeritus, at Columbia University, and director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, a research center on management and policy issues in telecommunications, internet, and electronic mass media. He served as a Public Service Commissioner of New York State and was appointed by the White House to the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. He has also taught at Columbia Law School, Princeton University's Economics Department and Woodrow Wilson School, and the Swiss universities of St. Gallen and Fribourg.
Gigi Sohn is the first executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband, the membership organization for municipally owned and publicly operated networks, which she joined in 2023. She spent 2013 to 2016 as counselor to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, where she worked on the commission's 2015 net neutrality rules, and before that co-founded and ran Public Knowledge, the consumer and intellectual property advocacy group, from 2001 to 2013. Earlier she directed the Media Access Project, the first public interest communications law firm. President Biden nominated her to the FCC in October 2021. She is a senior fellow and public advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society and a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.
Jonathan Nuechterlein is a distinguished scholar at George Washington University’s Competition Law Center and teaches antitrust and telecommunications law at Georgetown and the University of Virginia. He retired from Sidley Austin in 2024 after nearly nine years leading its Telecom and Internet Competition practice. Previously, he served as general counsel of the Federal Trade Commission, deputy general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission and assistant to the U.S. solicitor general. He is also co-author of Digital Crossroads: Telecommunications Law and Policy in the Internet Age.
Register for the In-Person Event on October 1, 2026
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Want to learn more about partnering with Broadband Breakfast on "250 Years of American Independence & 150 Years of American Telecommunications?" Email Sales & Marketing Director Quinn Nghiem at quinn@breakfast.media or Development Associate Akul Saxena at akul@breakfast.media
