The half trillion dollar a year U.S. telecom industry is the most advanced in the world, or at least it should be. This is one reason we’ve fought hard at UP to get the government to speed up the auctioning of valuable spectrum so we have the most advanced wireless telecom technologies on the globe.

But our tireless co-founder Steve Forbes points out in his latest column the madness of state and federal regulators still requiring maintenance of old-fashioned copper phone lines that date back to the 1930s instead of speeding up the adoption of fiber optic and wireless networks:

The story even gets stupider. The federal government is imposing tariffs on imported copper to make these networks even more expensive to maintain.