In a past life — that is, from roughly 1994-2004 — I spent an enormous amount of time countering the proponents of “open access” regulation for communications and high-tech networks.  My work in that field culminated in the publication of a 2003 book with my old Cato colleague Wayne Crews entitled, What’s Yours is Mine: Open Access & the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism. We aimed to counter the efforts of bureaucrats and central planners to command technology companies and industry sectors to share networks, facilities, or specific technologies with rivals in the name of “competition.”  Simply stated, sharing is not competing, and competition in the creation of networks is just as important as competition in the goods, services, and information that move across those networks.  Moreover, there are property right considerations that come into play when governments seek to commandeer networks or take over network management decisions.

But let’s just stick to the economic issue here regarding the incentives created by the network-sharing mentality of the “forced access” movement and the fiction associated with the belief that network sharing can create competition.  My old PFF colleague Randy May, who currently serves as President of the Free State Foundation, continues to cover developments in this field far closer than I do, and has always done much better work on the subject than me.  Recently, Randy addressed some new fictions put forth by the radical Leftist activity group, the (Un-)Free Press who are, once again, spinning a revisionist history of telecom and media policy.  Specifically, Free Press has recently suggested that in the late 1990s we lived in a veritable communications nirvana, with thousands of Internet Service Providers and/or “competitive exchange carriers” hotly “competing” for our business.  Here’s how Randy May addresses this:

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