The People and the Members

A steering committee chairman, an outside press desk in Washington, a Boston telecommunications economist, and twenty-four member companies and trade groups that together read like a floor plan of the whole 1990s computer industry.

Paul Misener and the steering committee

The coalition was run by a steering committee, and the person whose name appears on the surviving pages as its chairman is Paul Misener. He served as the coalition's principal point of contact, with a direct Washington telephone number, 202-626-4382, published on the site for anyone who wanted to ask about the coalition's position. In an operation this lean that is a substantive role rather than a ceremonial one: chairing the steering committee of a 24-member single-issue coalition means brokering a common position among companies that competed with each other everywhere else, and then holding that position steady through a six-month proceeding.

An unconfirmed note, offered as a research lead rather than a claim: a Paul Misener spent much of the following two decades as Amazon's vice president of global public policy, and it has been suggested that this is the same person. Nothing in the archived coalition record identifies the chairman beyond his name, title and telephone number, and we have not been able to confirm the connection from a primary source. It is recorded here as an open question, not as biography.

Angela Leung and The Dittus Group

Media inquiries went to Angela Leung of The Dittus Group, a Washington communications firm retained by the coalition. The detail is small and it says something about how the campaign was built. The coalition had no offices, no staff of its own and no permanent identity. It rented the functions it needed: an outside press operation, an outside economic consultancy, a website, and the existing government affairs departments of its member companies and trade associations.

That structure is now standard practice for issue coalitions, and it was already familiar in 1996. What was less familiar was the fourth element. Alongside the press releases and the filings, the coalition put its whole case on a public website and asked readers to act on it directly. The press desk handled journalists; the site handled everyone else.

Lee L. Selwyn of ETI, Boston

The evidence at the center of the fight came from Dr. Lee L. Selwyn, who founded Economics and Technology, Inc. in Boston in 1972 and has been its president since. His training was in the economics of regulated industries: a PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an MS in industrial management from MIT, and a BA in economics with honors from Queens College of the City University of New York. He taught on the Boston University faculty from 1968 to 1973, and in 1970 held a post-doctoral research grant in public utility economics under an AT&T-sponsored program at Harvard's Program on Technology and Society.

That last detail is worth pausing on, because it explains the character of the 1997 report. Selwyn's formation was inside the world of rate-of-return regulation, cost allocation and utility accounting, the discipline that decides which costs a monopoly may recover and from whom. The ETI study is not an argument about whether the internet is good. It is a cost causation and revenue attribution exercise applied to a set of carrier filings, which is precisely the exercise a regulator was equipped to evaluate.

Forty commissions and four countries

By the time the coalition hired him, Selwyn had spent a quarter century as an expert witness on telecommunications economics. He has testified before some forty state public utility commissions, before the FCC itself, before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, before Oftel in the United Kingdom and before Mexico's Secretariat of Communications and Transportation, and has appeared as an invited witness before committees of both the United States House and Senate on telecommunications deregulation.

His coauthor on the 1997 report was Joseph W. Laszlo, also of ETI. The firm worked from One Washington Mall in Boston, an address that appears on the title page of the study. Hiring ETI was a deliberate choice of register by the coalition: rather than answering the carriers' engineering filings with advocacy, it answered them with the same kind of document, produced by someone whose name a state commission staffer would already know.

From dial-up to broadband

ETI carried the argument forward as the technology changed. Two 1999 reports, Building A Broadband America and Bringing Broadband to Rural America, extended the same framework from second telephone lines to the deployment of high speed access, and the firm continued publishing broadband policy work into 2010. The through-line is consistent across three decades: infrastructure investment and competitive entry as the mechanism for affordable access, rather than usage pricing on existing plant.

The firm practices on today at econtech.com, which is also where its current qualifications material sits. That continuity is unusual. Most of the organizations involved in the 1997 fight either dissolved when it ended or have since been absorbed into something else.

Sixteen companies on the 1997 list

The corporate membership, as preserved on the coalition's own members page, was America Online, Apple Computer, Compaq Computer, CompuServe, Dell Computer, Digital Equipment, EarthLink Network, Eastman Kodak, GE Information Services, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Netscape Communications, Novell, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Sixteen firms, spanning personal computers, processors, operating systems, databases, browsers, networking software, consumer online services and one pure-play dial-up provider.

The composition is the interesting part. Only two of the sixteen, America Online and EarthLink, would have had access charges billed to them directly. The other fourteen joined because their products only made sense in a world where people stayed connected. A browser company, a database company and a film company had no shared commercial interest in 1997 except this one. Roughly half the names have since merged, been acquired or wound down, which is much of why the list is worth preserving: it is a photograph of who held a stake in an open, flat-rate internet in early 1997, taken the year before Google was founded.

Eight trade groups and what they brought

Eight associations completed the roster and supplied most of the procedural capability: the American Electronics Association, the Business Software Alliance, the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association, the Information Technology Association of America, the Information Technology Industry Council, the Software Publishers Association, the Internet Service Providers and Users Association, and the Voice on the Net Coalition.

Two of them are worth singling out. The Internet Service Providers and Users Association represented exactly the constituency the access charges would have landed on, the thousands of small and regional dial-up providers who had no Washington presence of their own, and it appears both as a coalition member and, on the take-action page, as an outside organization readers were pointed toward. The Voice on the Net Coalition existed because of a directly related fight, the early attempt to regulate internet telephony, and its presence shows that the industry already understood access charge policy and voice-over-internet policy as two faces of the same question.

Fellow travelers outside the industry

The coalition was an industry group and never pretended otherwise, but on this issue it lined up with public interest advocates. Its take-action page sent supporters to three of them: the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Media Access Project and the Internet Service Providers and Users Association, then at ispua.org. That is a notable list to publish on your own site, because it points readers toward organizations you do not control and cannot script.

The study travelled further than the coalition did. Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology, then tracking ISDN pricing, linked the ETI executive summary, and the telecommunications writer Andy Oram cited the report's chapters in his own work on network policy. Those links, and others like them, are why the original addresses on this domain still receive traffic almost three decades later, and why the coalition's pages are preserved here where they were first published rather than redirected away.