December 14, 2004

Speaker Biographies

F. Duane Ackerman is chairman and chief executive officer of BellSouth Corporation. Mr. Ackerman began his communications career in 1964 and has served in numerous capacities with BellSouth. Mr. Ackerman was named president and chief executive officer of BellSouth Telecommunications, BellSouth’s local telephone service unit and largest subsidiary, in November 1992. He was promoted to vice chairman and chief operating officer of the parent company, BellSouth Corporation, on January 1, 1995, and was elevated to the position of president and chief executive officer of BellSouth on January 1, 1997. On January 1, 1998, Mr. Ackerman was appointed chairman and chief executive officer of BellSouth. In addition to serving as a director of BellSouth Corporation, Mr. Ackerman is also a member of the board of the Allstate Corporation. Mr. Ackerman is the chairman of the national Council on Competitiveness, chairman of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, a trustee of Rollins College, and a former member of the board of governors for the Society of Sloan Fellows of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Robert W. Crandall is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he has worked since 1978. Mr. Crandall was the deputy director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability during the Ford and Carter administrations. He was also a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the George Washington University. He has been a consultant to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Antitrust Division of the Federal Trade Commission, and the Treasury Department. His interests include industrial organization, antitrust policy, regulation, competitiveness, deregulation, and telecommunications. He has published widely, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Regulation, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the American Economic Review.

Harold Furchtgott-Roth is president of Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises, which he founded in 2003. He frequently consults on issues related to the communications sector of the economy. From 2001–2003, Mr. Furchtgott-Roth was a visiting fellow at AEI, where he completed the writing of A Tough Act to Follow (AEI Press, forthcoming), a book about the difficulties implementing the Telecommunications Act of 1996. From 1997 through 2001, Mr. Furchtgott-Roth served as a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. In that capacity, he served on the Joint Board on Universal Service. He is one of the few economists to have served as a federal regulatory commissioner and the only one to have served on the Federal Communications Commission. Before his appointment to the FCC, Mr. Furchtgott-Roth was chief economist for the House Committee on Commerce and a principal staff member on the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Earlier in his career, he was a senior economist with Economists Incorporated and a research analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses. Mr. Furchtgott-Roth is a member of the Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Policy Advisory Board. He is the coauthor of three books: Cable TV: Regulation or Competition, with R. W. Crandall (Brookings Institution, 1996); Economics of A Disaster: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, with B. M. Owen et al (Quorum Books, 1995); and International Trade in Computer Software, with S. E. Siwek (Quorum Books, 1993).

Robert W. Hahn is cofounder and executive director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at AEI. Previously, he has worked for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Harvard University, and Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Hahn frequently contributes to general-interest periodicals and leading scholarly journals, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, American Economic Review, Yale Law Journal, and Science. Recently, he is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective and the editor of High-Stakes Antitrust. This year he will publish an AEI-Brookings book on the economic analysis of regulation and an edited volume on intellectual property rights in high-tech industries. In addition, Mr. Hahn is cofounder of the Community Preparatory School—an inner-city middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.

John Mayo is a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research has appeared in numerous economics, law, and public policy journals, including the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the Journal of Business, and the Journal of Regulatory Economics. He is coauthor of Government and Business: The Economics of Antitrust and Regulation (with David L. Kaserman, Dryden Press, 1995). Before his appointment at Georgetown University, Mr. Mayo taught at several universities, including Washington University, the University of Tennessee, and Virginia Tech. He has served as chief economist for the U.S. Senate Small Business Committee and as an adviser and consultant to public and private agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, AT&T, MCI, Sprint, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Department of Energy, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In that capacity, he has participated in a number of regulatory and antitrust proceedings and has testified before state and federal legislative and regulatory bodies on topics including monopolization, price fixing, mergers, and regulatory pricing policy.

Walter B. McCormick Jr. is the president and chief executive officer of the United States Telecom Association, the nation’s premier trade association representing the converged telecommunications industry. Mr. McCormick first established himself as one of the nation’s leading trade association executives while serving at the helm of the American Trucking Associations. Earlier, Mr. McCormick headed the practice group on Regulatory Affairs, Public Policy, and Legislation at Bryan Cave LLP. Before practicing law, he had a distinguished career in government. Mr. McCormick was nominated by President George Bush as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Transportation, where he served under Secretary Andrew Card. He also served for more than a decade on the U.S. Senate staff. Mr. McCormick was general counsel of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation in the 99th Congress and was Republican chief counsel and staff director of the Committee in the 100th, 101st, and 102nd Congresses. He was responsible for drafting many telecommunications and transportation laws and was identified by Roll Call magazine as one of the fifty most influential staffers on Capitol Hill.

J. Gregory Sidak is a resident scholar at AEI, the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics Emeritus at AEI, and the president and chief executive officer of Criterion Economics, LLC. He has directed AEI’s Studies in Telecommunications Deregulation since the project’s inception in 1992. Mr. Sidak served as deputy general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission from 1987 to 1989 and as senior counsel and economist to the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President from 1986 to 1987. Mr. Sidak has written five books, including Foreign Investment in American Telecommunications (University of Chicago Press, 1997) and Is the Telecommunications Act of 1996 Broken? If So, How Can We Fix It? (AEI Press, 1999). He has published approximately sixty scholarly articles in journals, including the Antitrust Law Journal, Contributions in Economic and Policy Research, Journal of Network Industries, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Industrial Organization, and Supreme Court Economic Review, as well as opinion essays in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other business periodicals. He is the coauthor of the chapter on remedies and the interface between antitrust and sector-specific regulation in the Handbook of Telecommunications Economics. Mr. Sidak has testified before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on regulatory and constitutional law matters.

View event details