Julius Genachowski To Head FCC

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The US President-elect, Barack Obama, has selected Julius Genachowski to lead the Federal Communications Commission. This appears to bode well for a forward-looking (or at least clued) Internet policy, since Genachowski is credited with running Obama's internet-based election campaign, and, according to 'Fierce Telecom,' 'has an impressive record working with technology and communications companies: He was Chief of Business Operations at InterActiveCorp; he's co-founder of Rock Creek Ventures, which currently backs 11 internet-based start-ups, and he's also served on the boards of numerous technology and new media companies, including The Motley Fool, Web.com, Truveo, and Rapt'."

Comments

Sweet victory

[unity100]

after all those years of telco induced horror, good news from u.s. government regarding internet at last.

Re:Sweet victory

[Rycross]

Well, consensus is not science. What I find to be more telling is that the 95% tends to be moderately good to very good science (supported by evidence, peer-reviewed, predictive) while the 5% tends to be moderate-at-best to bad science. At least that's what I have gathered from discussions of said papers.

Re:Sweet victory

[unity100]

ALL the supposedly derogative 'facts' you shoved in your nifty little post, is million times better than trying to employ a nation by waging a war in an irrelevant distant land, causing millions to die.

if you still havent realized what that was, its bush & co's employment policy. wage a war in a distant land, pump up credit consumption at home, hey - employment !

the entire world is having to bear the burden, and your country's bankruptcy severely disrupted global economy. bankruptcy, yes. you have SO big a deficit that it boggles the mind. youre running on empty, running on credit and goodwill from other countries you do business with.

and boy, will you have to pay for the adventure neocons did !

Re:What's his stance on censorship?

[Shakrai]

or will he take steps to allow parents to determine what their kids can and cannot see?

Why is that even a job for Government? I have a novel idea: supervise your kids when they are watching TV or using the internet.

One other thing to consider...

[Moryath]

Just imagine if someone in the Bush administration had acted like this.

Wouldn't you be screaming bloody murder? Wouldn't you be demanding an investigation into what was being hidden?

What's the difference?

Re:One other thing to consider...

[falcon5768]

The difference is timing and nature. She did it when the Internet was still a seldom used tool that hardly got a notice in fact the whole of records of email for the Clinton era probably could fill a 100gig drive and still have a ton of room left over. Also she flat out admitted the reason why, because a email of hers she had forgotten about came back to haunt her in Florida, you have to remmeber at the time email had barely even been used in court cases, no one knew email was for all purposes like putting it down on paper. Hell I know a company who had a very similar thing happen in regards to AIM around 98, a IM chat cam back to haunt a manager. Thus ended the companies allowance for using AIM.

Bush's administration used it and used in leu of the publicly paid for system to deceive the public. they for all purposes created a shadow organization to prevent people from seeing through the official records what they where really up to. In their case we are talking about whole Library of Congress sized amounts of data secretly being sent back and forth through all branches of government and people of intrest, especially since by this point email supplanted voice and paper record for doing things.

But then you knew that before you posted this and went ahead with it anyway.

Re:One other thing to consider...

[Sethus]

If you read the article you just posted, she simply didn't want to be in a position where she would be accountable for what she said. Sounds bad right?

My dad works in a high position in an international company and me, getting into the working world the last year, and him sat down to have one of our many talks about office politics. I showed him some of my many notebooks I use to document all the projects I have to do. He responded in kind of a story about his company being sued over a project he had been involved in; at the time he kept similar paper notebooks. He was terrified at being called in to testify.

Now I should explain, my dad is about as straight shooting, honest son-of-a-gun you ever knew. To this day he does not allow people to put mp3s on his computer. He paid a speeding ticket when he went to Panama, a country where it's common and accepted as Status Quo to bribe the cop who pulled you over. So why would be he scared to be called to testify?

Lawyers for one, they're professionals at twisting words and documents to their stories. You just don't know how they'll take your simple notebooks and use it against you; and you could then be held PERSONALLY liable. Needless to say, after the trial, my dad destroyed those notebooks.

Point is, just because you have nothing to hide, doesn't mean you won't be found at fault.

Re:One other thing to consider...

[The AtomicPunk]

Why do people keep acting like there's some substantial difference between Bush and Obama?

Hell, he's not even in office yet and we're already staying in Iraq. W00t!

Next you'll tell me there's some real difference between the Republican and Democratic parties... that one wants to spend hundreds of billions on corporate welfare, and the other wants to spend hundreds of billions on individual welfare....

ah crap, now I forgot which is which.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[gad_zuki!]

Wait, competent people from the startup-world with real success are "extreme leftists" but Bush's pick of fucking lawyer with no tech business experience is "good business sense?" Get off it already, no one but the Rush Limbaugh echo chamber believes these talking points.

Credentials aren't so hot

[girlintraining]

I'd rather have someone who didn't spend their life in management making decisions about how the internet should work. And that's all this guy has... Funding, venture capital, management. So he's great at money! Good--I'm sure he'll make a bunch of businesses very rich. But does he know what TCP/IP is? Does he understand what makes effective QoS policy? How about the difference between bandwidth and latency or (shudder) the OSI 7 layer [burrito] model of networking? Bluntly stated -- does this guy give two sh*ts about consumer interests?

This guy will be head of the FCC. Isn't that organization also very much about engineering, not just policy. If the FCC has become a policy-making organization and left its engineering roots, well how shall I say -- "Houston, we have a problem." And yes, the comparison to NASA I think is fitting, given it was another engineering-based governmental body that later become all about policies and management and has now sent two shuttles smashing into the ground because of it.

Change we can believe in. Heh--Yeah. Right. Looks like more of the same to me.

Re:Credentials aren't so hot

[Reality Master 201]

You'd make an awful manager.

Re:Credentials aren't so hot

[Rycross]

Management is a different skill set than technology. Whats important in a leader is being able to listen to people who are experts, learn from them, and then make a reasoned decision. Its not so concerning if he's not a techy if he has a track record of listening to informed techies and making good decisions based on that information. A track record of leading companies that effectively utilize the internet is such a track record.

Re:Credentials aren't so hot

[girlintraining]

You'd make an awful manager.

Probably, but the same could be said of Scotty. And without Scotty, Kirk wouldn't have a ship.

Re:Credentials aren't so hot

[girlintraining]

We need both managers and engineers, the problem is... Where are the engineers in the FCC and why don't they have a voice in how things are going? Because a lot of the FCC's decisions lately seem to be rolling out the doors with glaring implementation problems. Do they even employ them anymore?

Change we can believe in

[MikeRT]

How about Obama surprise everyone by doing something radical like announcing that he is going to make the FCC's only responsibility the licensing of spectrum and enforcement of (future?) federal cable and telecom franchising laws?

Re:Fine, "On Topic" then:

[Rycross]

Graduated from Columbia College and Harvard magna cum laude, was a senior official in the FCC, was on the board of directors for various companies, some utilizing the internet heavily (expedia.com), and was part of the working group that created Obama's technology and innovation plan. That's hardly what you portrayed, that he's a purely political pick without any credentials.

On a perusal of Common Sense Media's site, it seems that they offer ratings and tools for parents to help parents control what their kids watch. Oh the horrors! I can see how that's super-left-wing *eye roll*. A private org focusing on parental responsibility is EXACTLY the sort of thing I'd like to see from an FCC official.

In summary, I see nothing here that would suggest that he was a bad pick, and on the contrary, by your own link, he seems to be a good pick. I get it: you don't like Obama. But the amount of spin you're throwing into this is intellectually dishonest at best.

Re:What's his stance on censorship?

[idiotnot]

He'll be forced to enforce and expand it. Google for "fairness doctrine."

Re:What's his stance on censorship?

[cayenne8]

"With the ridiculous fines being handed down on censorship, I'd like to know where our new FCC chief stands. Are we to continue being the ass backwards country when it comes to censorship (nudity is bad, but violence is ok!), or will he take steps to allow parents to determine what their kids can and cannot see?"

Well, let's don't do away with violence...just allow more nudity.

I think it'd be a shame if they couldn't show Dirty Harry on TV (I think they censor it too much as it is). Let's just allow nudity too.....

Re:What's his stance on censorship?

[Anonymous Coward]

Community standards? Why should your community (presumable the bible-thumpers) be able to dictate what I am allowed to watch? Babysit you own damn kids.

Re:Yes... but...

[mcgrew]

• One of the first things Barack Obama did when he became president-elect was to post his own Web site, and everyone has one of those. A web site doesn't make you a nerd. Writing javascript for it MIGHT.
• At the Al Smith dinner, Obama made a relatively obscure joke about Superman, cracking that his real father's name was Jor-El. Watching Superman movies doesn't make you a nerd either. And knowing that Superman's father's name was Jor-el is hardly obscure.
• Not only did Obama pose for a photo in front of a statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois, he went even geekier and posted the photo at his Senate Web site (since deactivated). See the above.
• Appointed nerds to key cabinet posts, including the appointment of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to be secretary of energy. That doesn't make him a nerd himslelf, but it does show he may not be incompetent at his new job.
• Obama was supported by nerd icon Leonard Nimoy during his campaign, getting donation money (in Quatloos, no doubt) from Mr. Spock himself. According to some reports, he's been known to flash the Vulcan salute. An actor in a science fiction TV show/movie series is not a nerd, and getting that actor's support doesn't make you a nerd.
• At a campaign rally, Obama joked that John McCain was Kato to George W. Bush's Green Lantern. Again, reading comic books doesn't make you a nerd. Many non-nerds enjoy comics.
• According to Newsweek, after a campaign event Obama and his wife Michelle were making jokes about one another's wardrobe. Barack leaned close to Michelle's belt and tapped it, saying, "It's the (di)lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!" Watching Star Trek doesn't make you a nerd, although participating in a Star Trek convention in costume does make you a dork. And Obama was ony two years old when Scotty first beamed up Kirk.
• According to the London Telegraph, he's also read every single Harry Potter book Jesus, man, how many Heinlein, Doctorow, Clarke, Asimov, etc books has he read? Potter, Superman, Star Trek, have become very popular fiction. They may be popular among nerds, but they are also popular among non-nerds.
• Obama is a gadget guy, making use of devices like the Blackberry, the iPod, and (by some reports) the Zune. His tech addiction is causing a minor dust-up, as his security personnel are trying to convince him to part with his beloved PDA. Nerds don't just use tech, nerds design, disassemble, hack, mod, and otherwise interact with their bare metal. Businessmen use the technology like iPods and Blackberries that nerds design.
• Not only has the president-elect admitted to collecting Spider-Man comics, he's actually going to play a role in an upcoming comic book starring the noted webslinger. *Sigh*
• There's a secondhand report that Obama, when an intern quipped "All your base are belong to us", he leaned over, cocked an eyebrow, and responded, "What you say?" That suggests to me that he has never heard the phrase.

You might ask yourself if YOU are truly a nerd. Have you ever built a ham radio, or a guitar amplifier, or hacked a transistor radio into a guitar fuzzbox? Written computer programs (or at least shell scripts)?

Have you used the <li> operator for bullet points rather than using an asterisk?

There are 10 kinds of people - those who know binary, and those who do not. The latter may be nerds, the former surely are.

Obama is intelligent, but he's no nerd. Carter was a nerd, and a shitty President. He was better than Bush, who was kind of an anti-nerd.

Re:What's his stance on censorship?

[mcgrew]

The V chip is as useless as the ratings. Say "shit" three times in a movie and it's rated R. But you can chop people's arms and legs off and burn them up in lava and it's PG-13 (Star Wars). It's the sort of censorship that the establishment wants, and not necessarily the choices a parent migh make.

An example with my own kids when they were little: They were fans of Pee Wee's Playhouse, so I showed them the scene in the Cheech and Chong movie where Paul Ruebens gets arrested and spews obscenities at the cops. You should have seen the girls' faces!

OTOH I wouldn't let them watch Robin Hood, as watching a guy get his hand chopped off is IMO a bit much for kids, and I wouldn't even let them watch the TV version of The Terminator, because you still have Arnold ripping a guy's heart out and cutting up his own eyeball.

Pee Wee cursing isn't going to give them nightmares. Watching someone being dismembered will. The V chip was useless; I watched TV with them.

They still love Star Trek!