Let’s review briefly what competition today has done for us. We have long-distance prices that are 50 percent lower than they were 10 years ago. We have fiber-optic network, four bands of it, across the country. We have tremendous capacity for transmission of digital signals over this fiber-optic network. We have an explosion of products in computers, in telephone equipment, in faxes, in voice mail, in all of the products that just 10 years ago we as consumers couldn’t even imagine.
It is competition in breaking apart the local network from the long-distance network and allowing competition in the equipment side of the business which has caused this tremendous forward movement for consumers, lower prices, and bringing the United States to the forefront of the telecommunications revolution.
It is a fact that competition has made this country the preeminent leader in the world in telecommunications. Japan is behind us, Europe is behind us. We are exporting products, we are creating jobs, but more than that we have tremendous productivity and we have products and lower prices better than anywhere in the world. It is competition that has gotten us to this stage, and it is the antitrust decree and the modified final judgment which is responsible for that.
The time has come to move this important industry from the courts to legislation. The time is here, the time is now, and by taking the next step and opening the local loop, still monopolized by the Regional Bell Operating Companies, to competition, which only this bill can do fully and effectively and immediately, we can move into the next phase of the telecommunications revolution in this country. If we do that, if we do it wisely, if it we do it promptly, if we do it smart and with courage, we can continue to lead the world in this basic and vital industry which is now 10 percent of our gross domestic product.
The job of building the Nil the infrastructure that will permit broadband, interactive communication between all members of our society has been aptly compared to the building of the nation’s interstate highway system. Like the construction of the highway system, the construction of the Nil will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. And just as roads have enhanced this nation’s productivity and living standards, the completion of the Nil will make firms and individuals more productive. The Nil will also enliance the quality of our lives by creating new ways to educate adults and their children, improve our health care, give us better and cheaper ways of buying products and services, and entertain us at home.
There is no question that it affects the life of every American. It affects the economy of this country and it affects our competitiveness and productivity.
IT laws are set of legal enactments adopted by various countries in the present day. This relates to a well-channeled movement of digital information. IT laws deal with various dimensions of Information Technology. It includes computer software, access to digital information, access to software, protection of software, fire walling and proxy server set ups, confirming to the norms of internet usage and keeping the domain of e-commerce clean. Information technology is a huge domain. It creates quite many chances for humans to benefit but at the same time imposes a lot of evil within its territory. The hackers and internet criminals thrive on the feeling of searching loopholes. This endangers the entire IT network. The rut is all-pervasive. The social networking sites are in danger. The educative institutions and corporate workplaces are in peril. Hackers are all there. They can intend to malign a person or an organization for some personal vengeance. They can do it on behalf of somebody for money or the most contorted ones do it for the sake of sadist pleasure. This has forced countries to upgrade their IT law structures to efficiently combat cyber crimes and crime within the broader domain of information technology. Apart from the global laws relating to IT, many countries are also forming individual laws relating to such crimes. Few years ago India strengthened its commitment against such dubious crimes by passing the Information technology act 2000. It aims at barring any individual or organization from misusing or subverting computer terminals and network places belonging to the Indian Territory. It also bars similar misuse outside the country’s territory when the set-up is being owned or run by an Indian. The misuse can relate to the broadest and narrowest thread of information Technology. Reformed IT laws of today have necessitated certain amendments. Few additions that it has brought to its territory are: · Electronic Signature In Global And National Commerce Acts · Uniform Electronic Transactions Act · Uniform Commercial Code · Digital Signature And Electronic Authentication Law The idea is to tap the destructive movement of hardened internet criminals. Few lawyers in Munich are working on stronger precepts of Information Technology laws presently. Hopefully something more stern and concrete should come out of their endeavor.
The telecommunications revolution the merging of voice, video and other data transmission and the proliferation of new telecommunications products and services has been one of America’s leading technological and economic success stories. At bottom, the key reason is that our scientists, engineers and businesses have developed and introduced telecommunications technologies at a faster pace than anywhere else in the world.
Public policies that have promoted competition have been critical to this result. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the case of telephone services, where through the efforts over two decades of the Justice Department and Judge Harold Greene, and the work of the FCC, competition has become the central organizing principle of the industry.
Until the Department sued and eventually broke up AT&T, that company had a monopoly over this nation’s telephone market. It was a regulated monopoly, to be sure. But it was also one that thwarted competition and innovation. New companies like MCI that wanted to provide long-distance service could not do so because AT&T’s local operating companies refused to provide interconnections to their local loops. Similarly, other manufacturers of telephone equipment wanted to sell equally, if not more, innovative products but were frustrated by AT&T from doing so because of the telephone company’s incentives and ability, through its monopoly control of the local loop, to buy such equipment only from its wholly owned subsidiary. Western Electric.
These practices were ended when the Department of Justice, led by my antitrust law professor in law school, William Baxter, obtained a consent decree in 1982. A Modification of Final Judgment (MFJ) has since been administered with remarkable energy and wisdom by Judge Greene, to whom this nation owes enormous gratitude.
By unleashing competition in various segments of the telephone industry, the MFJ has delivered the benefits that competition in other markets routinely guarantees: innovation, better products and services, greater efficiency, and lower prices. Consider that since the MFJ:
Interstate long-distance prices for the average residential customer in real terms (adjusted for inflation) have fallen by more than 50 percent without compromising universal service;
There has been a virtual explosion in the types of telephones and services that consumers can choose from;
Competition has stimulated the development of hundreds of innovative voice and data services (such as call waiting and voice mail);
Spurred by smaller carriers and MCI and Sprint, the three largest long-distance providers (including AT&T) now have laid fiber optic cable throughout much of the country and thus have already built significant portions of the backbone for the Nil; and
Competition in the telephone equipment market has opened whole new markets and spawned the development and sale of new products.
In short, the MFJ has enabled the United States to maintain its technological leadership in telecommunications. Nations that have stuck to the old monopoly model of telephone services have fallen behind. That is why many are now trying to emulate us, rather than the other way around.
