Obama picks Net neutrality backer as FCC chief
President Obama on Tuesday nominated Julius Genachowski as the nation's top telecommunications regulator, picking a campaign advisor who has divided his career between Washington, D.C., political jobs and working as an Internet executive.
Genachowski had been mentioned as a likely candidate for the Federal Communications Commission post, in part because he participated in the Obama campaign's Internet efforts and previously worked as chief counsel to Democratic FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.
Julius Genachowski
(Credit: LaunchBox Digital)"He will bring to the job diverse and unparalleled experience in communications and technology, with two decades of accomplishment in the private sector and public service," Obama said in a statement.
Genachowski is likely to continue the Democratic push for more Net neutrality regulations, which are opposed by some conservatives and telecommunications providers. He was a top Obama technology advisor and aided in crafting a technology platform that supported Net neutrality rules.
The FCC's first official Net neutrality ruling--an earlier one resulted in a settlement--came last summer when the agency narrowly voted by a 3-2 margin that Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent was unlawful. That case is now before a federal appeals court.
Genachowski was a Harvard classmate of Obama's and previously worked for Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer. He's currently a co-founder of LaunchBox Digital and Rock Creek Ventures, and held executive posts including general counsel at IAC/InterActiveCorp, which owns a list of Web properties including Ask.com, Match.com, Gifts.com, Reference.com, Evite, Citysearch, and Excite.
IAC is a member of a coalition that supports more Net neutrality regulations and which also includes Amazon, eBay, and Google.
Genachowski doesn't take over the post officially until his nomination is confirmed, as expected, by the Senate.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
The best (simple) explanation I've seen of the farce that is "net neutrality" can be found here:
http://www.dontregulate.org/
That's what is interesting. To maintain a hands off approach to the internet, we need to create some laws keeping the cable and telcos hands off the internet too. The unregulated internet worked great while it was unregulated by anyone, but once conjob decided to forge packets to illegally terminate a lawful application and instill caps on our usage in order to expand their profits a little more the internet no longer was unregulated. It's just regulated by the cable companies and telcos now.
Do you like the idea of being forced to use the search engine that conjob wants you to use? What if you tried to do a Google search, but found that the site was so slow it wouldn't load because your ISP didn't like them ("they didn't upgrade to the higher bandwidth tier that guaranteed fast packet delivery, like Ask did"). THAT is what you're advocating here.
- by Randroid1138 March 3, 2009 11:46 PM PST
- The post by "LastLion" below points to a website called http://www.dontregulate.org/
- Reply to this comment
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(6 Comments)This is what is called "astroturfing", or fake activism by corporations, to fool the general public.
Hands Off The Internet (HOTI), the creators of the website, purports to be a campaign for internet users' rights, in fact the site is owned by big telecom companies and various right-wing groups. It is actually a front to push the telecom industry's objections to internet neutrality. Such "members" of HOTI are:
# Alcatel
# The America Channel
# American Conservative Union
# AT&T
# BellSouth
# Center for Individual Freedom
# Cinergy Communications
# Cingular
And more...
Check it out yourself:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hands_Off_the_Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing