How a former lobbyist became the broadband industry’s worst nightmare | Hacker News Reader

How a former lobbyist became the broadband industry’s worst nightmare

arstechnica.com

98 pointstzs28 comments

I hope his work doesn't just get undone 12 months from now by whoever Hillary puts in there. She doesn't seem to be very tech savvy and is quite business friendly.

As a hard core liberal, I share these types of concerns. Many of the peeps I lobby are from the tech industry. Lots of face-palm moments.

It's a mistake to assume tech savviness. Much I love, respect, and admire most of their policy work. Hell, I cringe at my own prior views on privacy, intellectual property, open markets, and so forth. And I'm chin deep into this stuff.

I've come to embrace building relationships, incrementalism, taking the long view on big issues. My younger fire-brand self would be appalled.

So lobby, lobby, lobby. Build the trust, move the needle. Camp Wellstone and others provide great resources and training, for those who want to step up.

As one politician, David Cobb, I greatly admire is fond of saying "Whenever I feel the heat, I see the light!"

http://www.wellstone.org/programs/camp-wellstone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cobb

It all just seems too perfect to me. Maybe he's just throwing us a few bones to shut us up? It's just so hard for me to believe that someone who made a career pulling favors for those people would be able to just completely cut ties. I mean, what reason does he have to do that? The goodness of his heart? His sense of duty? Call me jaded, but those explanations make me want to laugh out loud when I think of all the billions of dollars in the mix.

The core of the issue here is that you can never really assume you understand a person's motivations just because your prejudices have served up a narrative you like

You're just as equally naive to trust someone with strong industry ties just because they do you a couple of favors in a couple of years. I'll be looking at his entire tenure in that position before I decide that he's the industry's worst nightmare.

His blog is gone now, but if people had spent 2 minutes reading his writings before he joined the FCC, they wouldn't have been surprised when he was a strong backer of Net Neutrality. The guy is imminently reasonable, made a bunch of money investing in disruptive tech companies, and appears to be an excellent bureaucrat.

The cable companies might have once been the underdogs, but were they ever the good guys?

They seem to have succeeded in charging people for things that were free of charge. I heard originally that they claimed to be commercial free TV, but at some point, the cable channels decided to double dip with advertisements and rather than demand reductions in costs so cable bills would decline, the cable companies went along with it. They also enabled the rise of ESPN, which charges a fortune for things many would rather do without.

As far as I can tell, the broadcasters are the good guys ones.

Some of the agencies work has been ok but I disagree with the FCC forcing the lock down of wifi routers http://www.wired.com/2016/03/way-go-fcc-now-manufacturers-lo.... This affects me in a different country while the stopping of a merger between American telcos or preventing hotel wifi blocking etc are more local concerns.

I figure it this way, he knows what really is going on because of his insider experience and having fought to get competing systems access and market he knows how the game works.

I wonder if this report had any effect on how things are unfolding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

explained here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkjkQ-wCZ5A

Am I the only one on HN who actively avoids every political discussion or post as much as humanly possible? Or are there others like that out there too?

Then why are you here?

Actually, the HN guidelines say that most stories about politics are off-topic, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon (which isn't really the case here). There is a general bias against political posts and discussion here.

Talking about the FCC chair is definitely relevant content, as opposed to a general politics post. Wheeler is the FCC chair, and the FCC impacts the tech industry in about a billion and a half different ways, maybe more than any other single federal agency.

You might be able to hide from political discussions, but you cannot ever escape their consequences.

Why would you actively avoid every political discussion? The reality is politics affects many aspects of our lives especially with more and more legislation affecting the very technology we work with on a daily basis. Having a rational conversation and listening to other views can help move discussion forward and broaden awareness.

Politics is the name of the technology that we have worked out to prevent war. It's not a very good technology, and it needs lots of improvement, but it is better than war.

Posting a comment seems like a strange method of active avoidance

I was raised to think that politics and religion are not appropriate subjects for polite company; and even that raising either topic outside narrow situations is impolite. I have since grown to think the sentiment is wrong and destructive. Assuming others in your cohort feel similarly, It leaves those discussions to only those people who are willing to breach decorum, or you simply don't have them. The results are that we tend to hear more often from zealots than we do more moderate people, we also leave ourselves ill-equipped to discuss contentious subjects and resolve conflict amicably, and worst of all we make important decisions on matters that affect everyone using poor information and without the benefit of the perspectives of our peers.

In the past, when I myself was undecided on these two things, I'd agreed with you. Since then I've concluded that Catholicism is the correct religion, and that our current political systems are completely and hopelessly broken. At this point, there's nothing for me to change in these areas, and my job isn't to convince anyone else of my positions on either of these. (If they want to know more of why I believe what I believe in either area, I will gladly point them to some resources.) So it's absolutely useless for me to discuss them with anyone else.

The way I see it, after Obama lost the senate he felt the need to seem relevant, which ended up with him forcing Wheeler's hand on the net neutrality issue (he publicly pressured him to support net neutrality). As a result, Wheeler burned his bridges with his telecom friends and now he just has nothing left to lose.

That theory seems unnecessarily convoluted compared to the straightforward explanation in the article.

It also implies that Obama has been irrelevant, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Not to mention the only-in-the-valley idea that he would try and improve his popularity with the American people as a whole through an issue that the vast majority of people neither understand nor care about.

On the contrary, I said he was the reason why everything was put in motion in the first place. If anything I questioned his initial motives. If you follow politics you'd know what was the mood in the WH right after Obama lost the senate and how he felt the need to reassert himself. A lot of good has come from that.

Wheeler of course will give a self-serving explanation about the whole thing and since he is now "on our side" people will easily forget how he dragged his feet for months and months until Obama (along with increased pressure from the public) prodded him to take the net neutrality stance.

Your punditry is cable-news worthy.

Your puns aren't far behind. As I said, if you follow politics you'd know what was the mood in the WH right after Obama lost the senate and how he felt the need to reassert himself. A lot of good has come from that.

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