January 13th, 2009
Will Genachowski fight the phone monopoly?
News that Julius Genachowski will head the FCC has some activists and advocates on net neutrality doing handstands.
Genachowski was a classmate of President-elect Obama’s at Harvard Law, and was a staffer in Clinton’s FCC before joining Barry Diller at his short-lived IAC.
Most recently he was running a venture capital incubator, Launchbox Digital. (Which means he really needed a job! Rimshot.)
Alley Insider says that, for those who care about open spectrum Genachowski seems to have both the right friends and the right enemies. But Broadband Reports says that, on many issues, he’s still an empty page.
While you can expect Senate confirmation to center on Genachowski’s views on the digital transition, his views on the phone-mobile-Internet monopoly are far more important.
Bruce Kushnick’s TeleTruth has already filed the first salvo, a complaint alleging that AT&T and Verizon phonied-up data given the agency, demanding every FCC decision of the last decade be re-opened.
Meanwhile, Obama’s own plan to increase broadband is running into opposition from activists who call it a Bell subsidy. The fear is incumbents will gobble up the promised tax subsidies but competition will not result.
Verizon is also trying to get out of paying local taxes, saying it’s no longer a phone monopoly.
Put all these issues on the new chair’s plate and you’ll get a very good idea, very quickly, which way the broadband winds are blowing in the Age of Obama.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 01/13/09
