As the FCC strains to produce a National Broadband Plan, it should recall some history, and be humble.
[I]n 1872, a committee on railroad amalgamation was appointed. . . . [A]fter taking a vast amount of evidence, they proceeded to review the forty years of experience. . . . They showed with grim precision how, during that period, the English railroad legislation had never accomplished anything which it sought to bring about, nor prevented anything that it sought to hinder. The cost to the companies of this useless mass of enactments had been enormous, amounting to some L80,000,000; for these were 3,300 in number and filled whole volumes.
-- Charles Francis Adams, Railroads: Their Origin and Problems (1878), pp.89-90.
-- Charles Francis Adams, Railroads: Their Origin and Problems (1878), pp.89-90.
The decision was made not to borrow trouble, as the old phrase goes, but to let the system "develop itself in its own way," and act only in response to actual problems, which worked quite well.
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