Existing frameworks
Much of the technology we unthinkingly use every day started life in a haphazard, un-cordinated way. Then legislation was passed that took that technology to a new level of usefulness by giving it certain facilities only the state can bestow.
Some legal frameworks
Your phone can make a call to every other phone in the world. It wasn’t always that way. In the early days of the technology, companies fighting for dominance ensured one phone couldn’t be used to communicate with most of the other phones in town, never mind the globe. That was changed by governments’ determination to create one universal standard. Here’s the details, and some more key legislation that shaped facilities underpinning our daily lives.
What about the Net?
Why isn’t the Internet on this table? It was a radical new technology that spread very quickly in the 90’s. And there was never a legal framework to make it grow. So government was irrelevant to the way the web became basic infrastructure around the world?
No. The opposite is true. Most of the legislation in the table above was governments’ way of incentivising the private sector to fund universal access to an emerging technology. The Graham-Willis Act in the US for example gave AT&T a de facto monopoly on telephone standards in return for cabling up remote areas which weren’t commercially viable otherwise.
Government didn't need to incentivise the private sector to fund early stages, of the Net. It simply forked out the money itself. In the 70’s and 80’s the US taxpayer funded all aspects of the nascent Internet.
Marc Andresson, creator of the Netscape browser. Vanity Fair: June 2008
No-one wants government funding NEMs. The risks of this project shouldn’t be borne by the taxpayer. Nor would any democratic country want their politicians to ultimately have control over information and market structures in such a potentially pervasive system. The aim is to shape an opportunity that private companies will make reality but ensure those companies run the system as a genuine public utility.
Transient, but far ahead
The best legal frameworks have a limited life span. The behemoth that AT&T became for example was split into Baby Bells once the whole of America was cabled. But, it’s easy to forget how visionary these legal frameworks often were. They were based on a vision for the appropriate technology that was often light years beyond its usefulness at the time. Britain’s pioneering Postage Act provides a detailed example of that. Read more.
