Congress first specifically regulated broadcasting with the 1927 Radio Act, which created a Federal Radio Commission designed to regulate in “the public interest, convenience, or necessity.” But federal regulation of communications was shared by the Department of Commerce and the Interstate Commerce Commission. By 1934 pressure to consolidate all telecommunications regulation for both wired and wireless services prompted new legislation with a broader purpose.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s message requesting new legislation was published in January 1934; the Senate held hearings on several days in March; the House of Representatives held a single day of hearings in April; a conference report melding the two differing bills together appeared in early June; and the act was passed on June 19. The act generated little controversy at the time it was considered. Few proposed substantial alteration of the commercially based broadcast system encoded in the 1927 law. Some critics expressed concern about educational radio’s survival—and although Congress mandated the new FCC to consider setting aside some frequencies for such stations, this occurred only in 1941 with approval of FM service.

In its original form, the act’s text runs some 45 pages in the standard government-printed version and is divided into several dozen numbered sections of a paragraph or more, which are arranged in six parts called titles. The first title provides general provisions on the FCC; the second is devoted to common-carrier regulation; the third deals with broadcasting (and is of primary concern here), the fourth with administrative and procedural matters, the fifth with penal provisions and forfeitures (fines), and the sixth with miscellaneous matters (in 1984, a seventh title concerning cable television was added).

The act has been updated through amendment many times—chiefly with creation of public television in 1967 (provisions on the operation and funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting expanded title III) and the cable act of 1984 (which, as noted previously, created a new title devoted to cable regulation, sections of which were expanded in cable legislation of 1992).

Attempts to update substantially or replace totally the act have arisen in Congress several times, most notably during a series of “rewrite” bills from 1977 to 1982, and again in the mid-1990s. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 became the most extensive set of amendments to the 1934 law. Although focused largely on common-carrier concerns, the new amendments also extend broadcast station licenses to eight years and greatly ease ownership restrictions. Such efforts to change the law are driven partly by frustration with legislation based on analog radio and telephone technology still in force in a digital era of convergence. They are driven as well by increasing rivalries among competing industries—broadcast, cable, telephone, and others. They are also driven by political ideology that argues government should no longer attempt to do all things for all people, and by economic constraints that force government to operate more efficiently. Despite—or perhaps because of—its many amendments, the 1934 act has survived decades of technical, economic, and policy changes to remain at the heart of U.S. telecommunications.