Where have all the boundaries gone?

Interstate communications in the USA are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The guidelines within which the FCC must operate are set by the Communications Act of 1934, which primarily reflects the technology and industry norms of the late 1920s. There have been dramatic improvements since the second world war in the electronic technology which supports telecommunications. The past decade has brought changes in the price and performance of electronic components, eg Large Scale Integration (LSI), so great as to be a shift in kind and not merely one of degree. The impact of these advances in technology upon the FCC has been to make some of the fundamental distinctions upon which the FCC has based its actions meaningless (eg communications/computers, telephone/telegraph, multi-point/point-to-point, and monopoly/competition). Communications common carriage can no longer adequately be distinguished from many other forms of telecommunications or from non-communications activities in any substantive technical or economic sense. While it may be possible to develop criteria upon which valid distinctions can be based, these will have to be new ones -- the traditional criteria have been eroded by technology.