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> residential customers to attackers since 1996, and suffering about 10% 
> market share loss in business lines to CLECs." It's a lot easier to 
> think about evil C.E.O.s than to decipher that.
> 
> 
> Even in good times, F.C.C. World pays obsessive attention to the 
> commission's chairman. In bad times, the attention becomes especially 
> intense; and when the chairman is a celebrity F.C.C. World devotes 
> itself to full-time chairman-watching. The current chairman, Michael 
> Powell, is a celebrity, at least by government-official standards, 
> because he is the only son of Colin Powell, the Secretary of State. 
> Unlike his father, he has a kind of mesmerizing ambiguity, which 
> generates enormous, and at times apoplectically toned, speculation about 
> who he really is and what he's really up to. Powell is young to be the 
> head of a federal agency—he is thirty-nine—and genially charming. 
> Everybody likes him. Before becoming chairman, he was for three years 
> one of the F.C.C.'s five commissioners; not only is he fluent in the 
> F.C.C.'s incomprehensible patois, he has a Clintonesque love of the 
> arcane details of communications policy. He's always saying that he's an 
> "avid moderate." And yet he has a rage-inciting quality. One of his 
> predecessors as chairman, Reed Hundt, quoted in Forbes, compared Powell 
> to Herbert Hoover. Mark Cooper, of the Consumer Federation of America, 
> calls him "radical and extreme." Just as often as he's accused of being 
> a right-wing ideologue, Powell gets accused of being paralytically 
> cautious. "It ain't about singing 'Kum-Ba-Yah' around the campfire," 
> another former chairman, William Kennard, says. "You have to have an 
> answer." One day last spring, Powell, testifying before a Senate 
> subcommittee, delivered an anodyne opening statement, and the 
> subcommittee's chairman, Ernest Hollings, of South Carolina, berated 
> him. "You don't care about these regulations," Hollings said. "You don't 
> care about the law or what Congress sets down. . . . That's the 
> fundamental. That's the misgiving I have of your administration over 
> there. It just is amazing to me. You just pell-mell down the road and 
> seem to not care at all. I think you'd be a wonderful executive 
> vice-president of a chamber of commerce, but not a chairman of a 
> regulatory commission at the government level. Are you happy in your job?"
> 
> "Extremely," Powell said, with an amiable smile.
> 
> 
> One cannot understand Powell's maddening effect, at least on Democrats 
> and liberal activists, without understanding not just the stated purpose 
> of the commission he chairs but also its real purpose. The F.C.C. was 
> created by Congress in 1934, but it existed in prototype well before the 
> New Deal, because it performs a function that is one of the classic easy 
> cases for government intervention in the private economy: making sure 
> that broadcasters stick to their assigned spots on the airwaves. Its 
> other original function was preventing American Telephone & Telegraph, 
> the national monopoly phone company, from treating its customers 
> unfairly. Over the decades, as F.C.C. World grew up into a comfortable, 
> well-established place, the F.C.C. segued into the role of industrial 
> supervision—its real purpose. It was supposed to manage the competition 
> among communications companies so that it didn't become too bloody, by 
> artfully deciding who would be allowed to enter what line of business. 
> In addition to looking out for the public's interest, the commission 
> more specifically protected the interests of members of Congress, many 
> of whom regard the media companies in their districts as the single most 
> terrifying category of interest group—you can cross the local bank 
> president and live to tell the tale, but not the local broadcaster. 
> According to an oft-told F.C.C. World anecdote, President Clinton once 
> blocked an attempt to allow television stations to buy daily newspapers 
> in the same city because, he said, if the so-and-so who owned the 
> anti-Clinton Little Rock Democrat-Gazette had owned the leading TV 
> station in Little Rock, too, Clinton would never have become President.
> 
> 
> F.C.C. World may have been con tentious, but it was settled, too, 
> because all the reasonably powerful players had created secure economic 
> niches for themselves. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, the successful 
> breakup of A.T. & T.—by far the biggest and most important company the 
> commission regulated—deposited a thick additional sediment of 
> self-confidence onto the consciousness of F.C.C. World. A generation 
> ago, for most Americans, there was one local phone company, one 
> long-distance company, and one company that manufactured telephones, 
> which customers were not permitted to own—and they were all the same 
> company. It was illegal to plug any device into a phone line. By the 
> mid-nineteen-nineties, there were a dozen economically viable local 
> phone companies, a handful of national long-distance companies competing 
> to offer customers the lowest price and best service, and stores 
> everywhere selling telephone equipment from many manufacturers—and 
> millions of Americans had a fax machine and a modem operating over the 
> telephone lines. A.T. & T. had argued for years that it was a "natural 
> monopoly," requiring protection from economic competition and total 
> control over its lines. So much for that argument. Over the same period, 
> the F.C.C. had assisted in the birth of cable television and cell phones 
> and the Internet. It was the dream of federal-agency success come true: 
> consumers vastly better served, and the industry much bigger and more 
> prosperous, too.
> 
> The next big step was supposed to be the Telecommunications Act of 1996, 
> one of those massive, endlessly lobbied-over pieces of legislation which 
> most people outside F.C.C. World probably felt it was safe to ignore. 
> Although the Telecom Act sailed under the rhetorical banner of 
> modernization and deregulation, its essence was a grand interest-group 
> bargain, in which the local phone companies, known to headline writers 
> as "baby Bells" and to F.C.C. World as "arbocks" (the pronounced version 
> of RBOCs, or regional Bell operating companies), would be permitted to 
> offer long-distance service in exchange for letting the long-distance 
> companies and smaller new phone companies use their lines to compete for 
> customers. Consumers would win, because for the first time they would 
> get the benefits of competition in local service while getting even more 
> competition than they already had in long distance. But the politics and 
> economics of the Telecom Act (which was shepherded through Congress by 
> Vice-President Gore) were just as important. Democrats saw the act as 
> helping to reposition them as the technology party—the party that 
> brought the Internet into every home, created hundreds of thousands of 
> jobs in new companies, and, not least, set off an investment boom whose 
> beneficiaries might become the party's new contributor base. Clinton's 
> slogans about the "information superhighway" and "building a bridge to 
> the twenty-first century," which, like all Clinton slogans, artfully 
> sent different messages to different constituencies, were the rhetorical 
> correlates of the Telecom Act, and Gore's cruise to the Presidency was 
> supposed to be powered substantially by the act's success.
> 
> The F.C.C. had a crucial role in all this. The arbocks are rich, 
> aggressive, politically powerful, and generally Republican (though like 
> all important interest groups they work with both parties); they 
> immediately filed lawsuits, which wound up tying the hands of their new 
> competitors in the local phone market for more than three years. Through 
> rule-making, enforcement, and litigation, the F.C.C., then headed by 
> Reed Hundt, who was Gore's classmate at St. Albans, was supposed to keep