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Dave Farber Named FCC Chief Technologist

Posted by jamie on from the time-to-make-the-policies dept.

Telecommunications coder since the 1960s, outspoken professor, and testifier in the Microsoft trial David J. Farber has been named the chief technologist at the FCC. Currently at U-Penn he is working on high-speed networking and distributed computing. Those on his "Interesting People" mailing list know him to be on the cutting edge of the tech memepool. I'll rest a little easier knowing he's "on the inside."

1 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. This should be interesting by Mr.+Protocol · · Score: 4

    I take this as unalloyed good news. As far as I can tell the FCC was intended to regulate the use of the radio spectrum. It has had more and more stuff shuffled off onto it, and more and more of its critical decisions taken out of its hands by special-interest legislation in Congress.

    Dave has always enjoyed being in the thick of things. It was one of his grad students (Dave Crocker) who, while at Rand, wrote RFC 822. Dave was one of the prime movers behind CSNET, which as far as I can tell was the first ISP...run with government seed money as a trial baloon to see if the Internet could be financially self-sufficient. Dave was not only on the board of directors, he contributed software which he'd had written for other purposes.

    The reason that I'm heartened is that Dave isn't an expert in just one thing. He's one of the very few Renaissance men of the Internet, with a perspective far wider than most folks running around today. This is just the sort of person that the FCC needs. Those who think he should be elsewhere, where the "really interesting" stuff is happening, I think underestimate what the FCC is going to be doing (forced into doing) over the next few years.