The Cable and Telecommunications Professionals' Reference, 3rd Edition

2   Telecommunications Regulation

John Buckley

Introduction

Telecommunications regulation is the setting and enforcement of the rules of participation in the telecommunications services market, and is a major feature of the marketplace of most countries in the modern era. Regulation has a long history in the United States, where the 1934 Telecommunications Act placed obligations of various sorts on AT&T, the private company then providing many places in the United States with long-distance and local communications on a monopoly basis.

In many other countries where telecommunications services had been previously provided under government control, regulation arrived in the 1980s and 1990s when these countries sought to introduce private provision ...