Dimensions: 6.5'' x 9.25'' 213 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: February 1997 Hardcover ISBN: 0844740632 Price: $ 40.00 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

To change the way we think about competition, universal service, and interconnection in telecommunications, this book revisits a critical period in the development of American telecommunications: the period of unbridled competition between the Bell System and independent telephone companies early in this century.

Universal service is a focal point of telecommunications policy in the 1990s, not only in the United States, but in every other country that has begun to liberalize or deregulate its telecommunications industry. The new policy dialogue revovles around four questions. First, how much do the universal service obligations of incumbent telephone companies costs? Second, how those costs be financed in a competitive environment? Third, what kind of pricing and technical arrangements should be made to interconnect incumbent telephone companies with the new, competiting networks? Finally, shuold the service bundle designated as "universal service" be redefined to take into account new technologies, and if so, how?

In the United States, debate over those issues reached a milestone when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The new law is the first comprehensive revision of the Communications Act of 1934 and culminates twenty years of legislative struggle over how to adapt federal law to the new realities of telecommunications. Because one of the chief purposes of Milton Mueller's analysis is to mount a historically grounded challenge to that orthodoxy, the new law provides the perfect foil for a critique that links the historical and contemporary policy debates over universal service.

Milton L. Mueller Jr. is an assistant professor of communications at the Rutgers University School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies.