So true! There is a giant federal agency, FCC, the primary purpose of which is to preserve telco monopoly. Few people realize this is FCC's purpose. As usual, it's informative to pay more attention to results than to marketing. Even supposed "reforms" (why would an agency functioning in accordance with its stated goals need reform?) like the 1996 law have primarily led to increased revenue for monopoly telcos.
Faliciously Purporting that Federal Regulatory Agencies are intended to be something because that's how they currently function doesn't lend you any credibility. Instead it makes untrustworthy and manipulative.
It's completely possible to corrupt an agency and for the FCC to behave the way you described through political interference but that is not their intended purpose.
That's a nice portmanteau of "fallaciously" and "maliciously"; thanks for that. You seem to have concerns about "credibility". My suggestion would be not to worry too much about that. Paying attention to what is said, what is believed, and what is intended is asking to be fooled. Instead, pay attention to what is done. The USA polity has functioned in substantially the same fashion (even if at inexorably increasing scale) for about 150 years. One might imagine that voters can't always predict the consequences of their actions, but legislators certainly can. In 1934 a majority of legislators had concluded that telecommunications should be provided by a single monopolist, despite the fact that there had been a thriving market in previous decades. So, they wrote a law that enshrined that preference. In later years typically Panglossian economists would be inspired by FCC policy to misread Mill's discussion of "natural" monopolies. We're still dealing with this.
Leaving politicians aside, perhaps this is too harsh a judgment of FCC personnel? To an extent, yes, because some of them are janitors or IT helpdesk folks. However, most people at FCC have at least an inkling of how things really work. At the minimum, they know where the third rails are. They know that asking "why can't more of the spectrum be unlicensed like the wifi band?" is a career-limiting speculation. They know that every Chairman Wheeler will be soon followed by a Chairman Pai.
I assume you're referring to the Kingsbury Commitment? I'm familiar with it and the creation of the FCC a decade or so later to take over responsibilities of the FRC and ICC but I've not read anything that delves into the politics surrounding it all or how closely they're related.
Whenever you hear "deregulation", think "choosing winners".
The form of "deregulation" we get from Ajit Pai's FCC selectively advantages the incumbent oligopoly of telcos, leaving in place the most grotesque market-distorting regulations and removing controls on vertical integration which allow for the expansion of telco power into other industries.
Market failure can take myriad forms. The ISP situation in the US is a particularly maddening variant.
The "deregulation" of 1996 had many examples of this. ILECs were allowed into long-distance phone service, which they used their monopoly LEC rents to dominate. UNE-P tricked CLEC/ISP investors into thinking they'd be allowed to compete, but since none of the requirements it imposed on ILECs were enforced, those investors ended up selling their equipment and customer bases to ATT/VZN for pennies on the dollar. The Daughters Bell were allowed to reconsolidate from only the most profitable territories, while money-losers like Hawaii and rural New England (e.g. Fairpoint) were unloaded to fools who weren't capable of serving them well. In every case, the monopolist won.
