Executive Summary
In the mid-1990s as it seemed that lawmakers were about to abandon much of the regulatory apparatus that had hampered the telecommunications industry since the 1930s, the telecom equipment industry began to boom, helped in part by the rise of the Internet. The deregulatory trend led ultimately to the 1996 Telecom Act, and soon the architects and implementers of that act were congratulating themselves on a job well done. We were supposedly building a new telecom infrastructure fit for the information age.
Then, in 2000, shipments of telecommunications equipment went into sharp decline, and construction of the information age infrastructure came to a grinding halt. Lots of money and jobs were lost, and the new class of telecom industry executives that had emerged in the post-deregulatory era got most of the blame. These people were thought to be manipulating the market and misleading consumers about sales and growth. Once the truth came out