June 26th: Happy Carterphone day!

Happy Carterphone day! On June 26th, 1968 the FCC ruled that AT&T was required to let any specification-compliant phone onto the public telephone network, regardless of manufacturer. From the Ars-Technica Article:

Take a look at the FCC's best rulings, and there you will find Carterfone. You will find it, for example, in the agency's 1998 decision to let consumers pick and choose their own cable set top boxes...in the FCC's 700Mhz auction Block C concept, with its requirement that consumers can connect any broadband device to that portion of the mobile phone spectrum...the proposal that a merged XM/Sirius must let developers build any kind of receiver linking to the new broadcaster, including receivers that also play mp3 files and connect to the Internet.

In the end, Carterfone says that it is our telecommunications system, not AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast's. We finance the system with our subscription, application, and investment money. We support it with utility easements, regulatory breaks, and government contracts paid for by our taxes. We make it work because we are its workers. We make it exciting with our innovations, technical and social, big and small.

We do not begrudge the CEOs of these great corporations their legal positions. But they are, as Andrew Carnegie would put it, stewards of the system, not its owners. They are not there to tell us to Go Away. They are there to keep the system running while we discover it, use it, develop it, innovate it, game it, finesse it, and reinvent it to our heart's content. The great enterprise of telecommunications is no better than our right to participate in it as individuals.