Time for New Telecom Act, Panelists Say
A new framework should account for technological evolution, experts said at a Benton event
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25, 2026 – The 1996 Telecom Act is in need of an update, experts said Wednesday at a Benton Institute for Broadband & Society event.
The law’s more comprehensive regulatory regimes don’t cover broadband, which is now much more widely used than the services the Telecom Act was aimed at, said Scott Jordan, a computer science professor at UC Irvine and former technology chief at the Federal Communications Commission.
“Title II pertains really only to landline phone. We’re down to 20 percent subscription and falling,” he said. “Compare that to broadband — 90 plus percent of people use broadband. Title II is not hitting the service that most of us are using.”
Title III of the act, he said, applied to broadcast TV and mobile voice service, both products with fewer and fewer users.
“How many of you have a voice-only cell phone plan? Nobody,” he said.
In terms of a new Telecom Act, Michigan State professor and former top FCC economist Jonannes Bauer said it would be important to have a framework that could apply as essential communications technologies changed. Affordability and cost would also likely continue to be an issue, he said, since true competition often doesn’t arise among infrastructure providers in less dense areas.
The act did recognize that the definition of universal service will change, which he said was positive, but it was still heavily framed around voice telephony.
“In that sense, it came at the wrong time with the wrong principles,” he said.
He said the act did give the FCC a way to assess the deployment of advanced communications services, which Bauer said was potentially a good framework to do some horizon scanning, but in practice the findings often reflect preexisting beliefs about broadband deployment, he said.
KC Claffy, director of UC San Diego’s Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis, said any new regulation should define the problem it’s trying to solve.
That would mean concretely defining and measuring, for example, things like progress toward universal service or improper prioritization in internet traffic, a difficult task.
“We really haven’t achieved the measurement of the basic things from the ‘96 Act in my view. We have a long way to go,” she said. “But I would also say that there’s more motivation and incentive to get that kind of transparency and accountability that we haven’t had since ‘96.”
A new comprehensive telecom and broadband regulatory scheme would be a big legislative lift, and not something Jordan thought Congress would accomplish in the near future.
Before the panel, Revati Prasad, Benton’s executive director, said the group wanted to emphasize that the value of connectivity “can’t be captured in the transaction between network operator and subscriber. Infrastructure by definition is an intermediate good, in that it creates social value downstream when used productively."
