250 Years of American Independence & 150 Years of American Telecommunications
The event will take place online at 12 Noon ET on Thursday, October 1, 2026
Register for $150!This pathbreaking online-only event will:
- Celebrate the uniqueness of American contributions to communications
- Survey the history of American telecommunications with recaps from 3 separate 50-year periods
- Engage with the themes of innovation and competition across the 150-year arc.
Attendance is available ONLY to Paid Breakfast Club Members. Sign up to become a member now – for only $150 – to participate. As a Breakfast Club Member, you'll also get 3 months' access to unlimited news content on Broadband Breakfast, including our online course, "150 Years of American Telecommunications."
The Program Begins Online at 12 Noon ET!
Keynote Remarks: Senator Deb Fischer
A lifelong Nebraskan, Deb Fischer is the senior senator from Nebraska. Senator Fischer was first elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2012, becoming the first Nebraska woman elected to a full term and the first Nebraska state senator elected directly after service in the state legislature. She was reelected for a second term in 2018, and in November 2024, Nebraskans voted to send her back to the Senate for a third term. During the 119th Congress, she serves as deputy whip under Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), working to present the concerns of Nebraskans directly to Republican Senate leadership. She also serves on six important Senate committees: Armed Services, Appropriations, Commerce, Agriculture, Rules, and Ethics.
Senator Fischer believes the first duty of Congress is to defend the nation. As a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she is committed to defending against growing threats to our homeland and our allies. She serves as Chair of the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, which 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. The subcommittee directly oversees two unified combatant commands: U.S. Strategic Command, headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and U.S. Space Command.
Historians' Recap: 1927–1976: Broadcasting, Cable and the Creation of the Media
Thomas W. Hazlett is the H.H. Macaulay Endowed Professor of Economics at Clemson University and a former chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission. His research examines telecommunications markets, spectrum policy and the regulation of wireless technology. He also directs Clemson’s Information Economy Project. Hazlett is the author of The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone.
Historians' Recap: 1977–2026: Computing, the Internet and Artificial Intelligence
Christopher S. Yoo is the Imasogie Professor in Law and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of its Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition. His research spans telecommunications regulation, network neutrality and the economics of internet networks. He also co-directs Penn’s Center on Media, Technology and Democracy. Yoo is the author of The Dynamic Internet: How Technology, Users, and Businesses Are Transforming the Network.
Register for the Online Event on October 1, 2026
Get 3 Months of Breakfast Club Membership!
Register for $150Panel 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 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.
Shane Greenstein is the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he co-chairs the HBS Digital Initiative and teaches in the Technology, Operations and Management unit. A leading economist of the information technology industry, he has spent decades studying how innovation, competition, and market structure shaped the rise of digital markets. He is the author of How the Internet Became Commercial, an economic history of the internet's transition from a government research network to a private industry. He co-directs the program on the economics of digitization at the National Bureau of Economic Research and writes the long-running technology blog Digitopoly.
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 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 Online Event on October 1, 2026
Get 3 Months of Breakfast Club Membership!
Register for $150ALSO: Introducing the Online Course, "150 Years of American Telecommunications"
Partner with us
Sponsorship opportunities are available for organizations that want to be part of that story and reach Broadband Breakfast's audience of broadband professionals, policymakers, and industry leaders.
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
