Stuart Brotman, the inaugural Howard Distinguished Endowed Professor of Media Management and Law and Beaman Professor of Communication and Information, authored essays on several national sites today to mark the twentieth anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Brotman joined UT’s College of Communication and Information on January 1. A former Harvard University professor, he is nonresident senior fellow in the Governance Studies Program of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He has served on the US Department of State Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy, as an arbitrator and mediator of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and on the Media Institute’s Global Internet Freedom Advisory Council. During the Carter administration, Brotman served as special assistant to the president’s principal communications policy advisor and as chief of staff at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
The 1996 Telecommunications Act was the first significant overhaul of US telecommunications law in more than sixty years, and it was the first time the Internet was included in broadcast regulations.
Brotman’s essays about the 1996 Telecommunications Act include “Congress and the Internet: Silence As a Policy Choice” in Morning Consult; “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 Struck the Right Federal-State Balance of Power” in InsideSources; “Twenty Years after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Rekindling Congress’s Political Will” in The Hill; and “Was the 1996 Telecommunications Act Successful in Promoting Competition?” on the Brookings Institution blog.