Many have expressed shock that the Obama administration would walk back one of its biggest promises. Critics have been quick to highlight the fact that the Obama-appointed FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, the new head of the FCC, is a former lobbyist with close ties to the telecommunications industry. (In March, telecom companies—including Comcast, Verizon, and the US Telecom Association—filled the sponsor list for a reception to toast Wheeler and other FCC commissioners.) The backgrounds of the new FCC staff have not been reported until now: Take Daniel Alvarez, an attorney who has long represented Comcast through the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP. In 2010, Alvarez wrote a letter to the FCC on behalf of Comcast protesting net neutrality rules, arguing that regulators failed to appreciate “socially beneficial discrimination.” The proposed rules, Alvarez wrote in the letter co-authored with a top Comcast lobbyist named Joe Waz, should be reconsidered. Today, someone in Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters is probably smiling. Alvarez is now on the other side, working among a small group of legal advisors hired directly under Tom Wheeler, the new Obama-appointed FCC Commissioner who began his job in November. As soon as Wheeler came into office, he also announced the hiring of former Ambassador Philip Verveer as his senior counselor. A records request reveals that Verveer also worked for Comcast in the last year. In addition, he was retained by two industry groups that have worked to block net neutrality, the Wireless Association (CTIA) and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Around the time of Delnero’s hiring, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, a former associate general counsel at Verizon, announced a new advisor by the name of Brendan Carr. Pai, a Republican, has criticized the open Internet regulations, calling them a “problem in search of a solution.” It should be of little surprise that Carr, Pai’s new legal hand, has worked for years as an attorney to AT&T, CenturyLink, Verizon, and the U.S. Telecom Association, a trade group that has waged war in Washington against net neutrality since 2006. A trail of online documents show that Carr worked specifically to monitor net neutrality regulations on behalf of some of his industry clients. The FCC is one of many agencies that have fallen victim to regulatory capture. Beyond campaign contributions and other more visible aspects of the influence trade in Washington, moneyed special interest groups control the regulatory process by placing their representatives into public office (the rotating door), while dangling lucrative salaries to those in office who are considering retirement. The incentives, with pay often rising to seven and eight figure salaries on K Street, are enough to give large corporations effective control over the rule-making process and over our federal government. The revolving door, however, provides a clear and semi-legal way for businesses to directly give unlimited cash and gifts to officials who act in their favor. And the FCC is stocked with staffers who have recently worked for Internet Service Providers (ISP) that stand to benefit tremendously from the defeat of net neutrality. The Democrats and Republicans have worked as a team to deregulate and place in private hands the entirety of the U.S. media and its delivery system. It took nearly three decades to whittle down the media ownership landscape from a thousand small companies to a mere six. These six companies now control the vast majority of the 10,000+ terrestrial and cable television and radio stations. In 2011 Obamas FCC officially killed the Fairness Doctrine, forever wiping the voice of the public from the airwaves it owns. prwatch.org/news/2011/06/10804/rip-fairness-doctrine Using deception and delay, the final piece of the nations communications system, the internet, is now being stealthily placed under private control. Democracy is impossible when the public is shut out from having a meaningful input into the national discussion. Whoever controls the media controls the country. Period. m.vice/read/former-comcast-and-verizon-attorneys-now-manage-the-fcc-and-are-about-to-kill-the-internet
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 01:21:05 +0000