More than 10 months after taking office, President Biden is moving to fill out the offices of the Federal Communications Commission—and end a stalemate between Democratic and Republican leadership at the agency behind most federal telecom regulations.
Biden named Acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel to be the FCC’s full-time chair and nominated former FCC advisor Gigi Sohn to the spot left open on the five-member commission since former Chairman Ajit Pai’s term expired in January. Axios, the New York TimesNew York Times, and others first reported the news Tuesday morning.
“I am deeply humbled to be designated as Chair of the Federal Communications Commission by President Biden,” Rosenworcel said in a statement. “It is an honor to work with my colleagues on the Commission and the agency’s talented staff to ensure that no matter who you are or where you live, everyone has the connections they need to live, work, and learn in the digital age.”
Both Rosenworcel and Sohn have been consistent advocates for restoring the net-neutrality regulations that the FCC passed in 2015 and that Pai rushed to scrap in 2017.
In a video interview with PCMag EIC Dan Costa at MWC Barcelona in 2018, Rosenworcel called ditching those rules a “blunder” that enraged the American public. “People have written my office more on this issue than anything else that I’ve ever worked on at the agency,” she said.
Rosenworcel, first named to the FCC by President Obama in 2012 and nominated to a second term by President Trump in 2017, warned that providers would use their new ability to block or slow specific sites and services to demand payment from them, eventually strangling some startups.
That does not seem to have happened—but we have seen providers tracking customers’ online activity, something the FCC was set to use its net-neutrality authority to police before Republicans in Congress quashed the pending privacy regulations in early 2017.
Rosenworcel has also regularly backed expanding broadband availability—starting before the pandemic made that problem obvious. She was an early critic of the FCC’s attempts at mapping broadband from inexact ISP-submitted data. “They’re riddled with errors,” she said of these attempts at the 2018 Atlantic Festival conference in Washington. “It’s wrong about my house!”
Rosenworcel also helped popularize the phrase “homework gap” to describe students without adequate connectivity at home. Sample quote from a 2019 Washington event hosted by Common Sense Media: “The homework gap exists in rural America, urban America and everywhere in between.”
Sohn, meanwhile, helped write the net-neutrality rules as an FCC advisor from 2013 to 2017 that followed a 12-year term leading the tech-policy group Public Knowledge. Since then, she has criticized broadband-buildout policies that rule out “overbuilding” into incumbent providers’ territories, telling me for a magazine feature this summer that “The opposite of overbuilding is monopoly preservation.”
Liberal tech-policy advocates are cheering the expected news. Free Press co-CEO Craig Aaron called Rosenworcel “a champion of the public interest” and lauded Sohn as “a devoted advocate for policies and programs that will help people and actually improve their lives.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Rosenworcel would be the first woman to head the FCC on a permanent basis. She and Sohn would join Republican Brendan Carr, named by Trump in 2017, Democrat Geoffrey Starks, named by Trump in 2018, and Republican Nathan Simington, named by Trump in 2020.
By law, only three commissioners can belong to the same political party, which can lead to such odd-couple picks as Trump restoring Rosenworcel to the FCC after her first five-year term ended—and to Obama naming Pai to the FCC in 2011 as one of his Republican nominations.
Also nominated by Biden today: Alan Davidson for Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and Kathi Vidal for Under Secretary for Intellectual Property and Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office, both in the Commerce Department.
Editors’ Note: This story was updated with confirmation from the White House and a statement from Rosenworcel.
