Americaâs greatest technological leaps have always come when the people building the future werenât waiting on permission. From the microchip to the mobile web, weâve led not because of bureaucracy, but despite it.
The United States has more Nobel Prize winners than any other country in the world. 47% of the worldâs unicorns are based here. U.S. venture funding totaled $178 billion in 2024, accounting for more than half of the global capital. But abundance has only been our default setting when builders arenât handcuffed by regulators.
President Trumpâs âOne Big Beautiful Billâ (OBBB), signed into law last week, demonstrated that Washington knows how to cut the cuffs: permanent tax relief, fresh spectrum auctions, and a light-touch mindset that tells founders, âShip it.â
By restoring the FCCâs spectrum auction authority, the OBBB converted idle airwaves and dead capital into growth infrastructure. These once-static assets are now a valuable resource that founders can monetize, exactly the kind of leverage that PayPal, Facebook, and SpaceX thrived on.
Last week also proved Congress can move at the pace of private-sector builders. Whatever you think of the legislation, be it beautiful or bad, markets notice velocity. When the Hill moves faster than a seed round closes, investors swing from yield back to risk. The bill is that signal flare.
But the job is only half done. Two bottlenecks still threaten to throttle our next wave of innovation: the FCCâs abusive interpretation of the TRACED Act, and the lack of a federal moratorium on state-level AI regulation. Unless Congress addresses both this session, the digital golden age President Trump is fighting for will stall in compliance purgatory, not technical debt.
We were on the goal line of securing the AI moratorium in the OBBB, only to watch it disappear in a backroom deal. That provision would have preempted a patchwork of state rules and created a single, national framework for AI governance. Instead, Sacramento is drafting GPU licensing schemes, Albany wants pre-launch audits, and Illinois is threatening biometric class actions. Fragmentation kills network effects and sends capital to Dubai or Singapore, not Ohio or Texas.
The OBBB got spectrum right. The âOne nation, one set of rulesâ framework must now extend to AI.
Weâve already seen the cost of ignoring this. Last week, someone used an AI-generated voice to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and targeted foreign ministers, a governor, and a sitting member of Congress. It was the inevitable outcome of a policy environment that values paperwork over real defense. The FCC has had years to implement STIR/SHAKEN and mandate IP interconnection. They didnât. And now the threatâs gone from robocalls to rogue-state ops running voice phishing at scale.
At Telnyx, we sign 100% of our outbound calls. Yet fewer than 30% of those signatures reach the destination. Why? Because the FCC never required full IP interconnection, even though the technology has existed for over two decades. Instead, they buried smaller carriers in legal uncertainty, deterring the very innovation needed to make the framework work.
Meanwhile, FCC 19-51 handed big telcos blanket call-blocking powers. Unsurprisingly, they abused itâmonetizing the âsolutionâ through The Campaign Registry, Branded Caller ID, and âreputationâ APIs. Theyâre blocking legitimate calls, hurting commerce, and undermining trust in the phone network itself.
Consumers still get 5 billion robocalls a day. Mobile carriers now generate nearly half of all traceback requests, often for scams that originated on their own networks. And they profit every step of the way.
The irony? These are companies that spend less than 1% of revenue on R&D. Software companies like ours spend closer to 30%. We canât expect AT&T to innovate. And we shouldnât let them write the rules.
The TRACED Act wasnât the problem. The FCCâs interpretation of it was. What was meant to target scammers turned into a compliance trap for smaller providers.
The good news is this is fixable. Start with IP-to-IP requirements. Make STIR/SHAKEN work end-to-end. Replace the ITGâs traceback cartel with a Scamwatch-style modelshared infrastructure, real-time alerts, and rules that apply equally to everyone. Focus on identifying the bad actors, not penalizing whoever picked up the call.
At Telnyx, weâve living proof of what can happen when the federal government gets innovation right. We started as a two-person VoIP reseller in Chicago. Today, weâre a global communications platform powering billions of calls and real-time AI voice interactions. Our turning point came when federal law preempted state licensing of internet telephony. That legal clarity unlocked growth. When that shield slipped under the FCCâs current enforcement approach, we spent millions on legal counsel instead of writing code.
Now splice that same kind of legal exposure onto AI. If every state can subpoena weights or offer bounties for âbiasedâ outputs, venture term sheets evaporate. Capital is cowardly. It flees to clarity.
President Trumpâs OBBB reopened the frontier. Now Congress must finish the job: rein in the FCCâs abuse of TRACED, and impose a timeout on state AI adventurism.
Do it, and American builders will turn spectrum and tax stability into the next trillion-dollar platformsâbuilt here, employing Americans, defended by American code.
Delay, and we hand the initiative to bureaucrats whoâve never written a line of code, and to foreign rivals who never ask permission to build.
Builders have punched the hole in the wall.
Congress, step through.
David Casem is the Co-Founder and CEO of Telnyx. As a self-taught engineer and entrepreneur, David built the first iteration of a phone company using open source software, a few relationships and a license from the FCC. Telnyx is now a global software-defined telco whose problem domain includes identifying the best submarine cables to interconnect continents and understanding international regulatory systems to arbitrage the wireless spectrum.
(Featured Image Media Credit:Â Screen Capture/NBC Nightly News)
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