Telecommunications Act a bust?

The New York Times reports that Congress and media industry executives think they need to overhaul the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the "eight-year-old landmark law governing the nation's telephone, cable and media businesses ... because, they say, it has already become outdated by new technology and industry trends." It's interesting to note that the country survived from 1934 to 1996 with the previous Communications Act (which, although amended and revised from time to time, remained the cornerstone of U.S. telecom policy for more than 60 years - in fact, it remains the basis for the 1996 act). The Times report notes that the 1996 law is outdated, and fails to take account of new technological developments (such as phone services over the Internet); it quotes one industry analyst as saying "a train wreck is approaching, and that there need to be some changes." Perhaps the more fundamental point is that it was such a flawed bill to begin with. The trouble is, the previous bill was written in a dominant deregulatory environment, largely for the narrow interests of private, commercial media owners, rather than the broader public interest. Nothing has changed. If today there is "no consensus" about where the rewrite should go, that's surely because there is no consensus among those commercial interests about how best to make money out of us, the Poor Bloody Consumers, in the rapidly changing media-technological environment. Under these circumstances, I suppose it would be too much to ask the current government to draft a bill that pushed commercial interests to one side and looked to the public interest first, wouldn't it?