Ford, Carter, and Deregulation in the 1970s

Several respected experts recently declared victory in the deregulation of telecommunications, favorably comparing changes in the industry to the 1970s, when Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter eliminated regulations on transportation and oil and gas industries. Compared to that wave of deregulation, however, declaring victory in telecommunications is premature. Regulatory reform in communications has always lagged behind reform in transportation and oil and gas by several decades, and the gap has not yet closed. When deregulation of transportation and oil and gas began in 1974, substantial sectors of those industries had already been freed of regulation and opened to competition. The process of opening sectors of telecommunications to competition, however, only started in 1974. In the transportation and oil and gas industries, a second deregulatory step lifted the entire regulatory edifice. That second step has yet to be taken at the federal level in telecommunications. While the process of deregulation is underway in some states, progress has been slow. For example, the California commission recently lifted price regulations on retail services, but it is still considering whether to eliminate tariffs and contract filing requirements. Some smaller states have gone further and eliminated tariffs for retail telecommunications