The following article was published by TechDirt.
Last March, popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn’s appointment to the FCC fell apart, after telecom and media giants (with the GOP’s help) waged a year long lobbying and propaganda campaign falsely framing her as a radical (The Verge has a good new interview with Sohn on what happened, in case you missed it).
The campaign was highly illustrative of not just the level of corruption in Congress and the regulatory nominee confirmation process, but how terrified companies like Comcast, AT&T, and News Corporation are of regulators who actually pursue policies of interest to the public (like say lower broadband prices, net neutrality, privacy protections, or media consolidation limits).
Sohn has since shifted focus to an arena I’d argue has more of a real-world impact than the majority of what the FCC is doing: community owned and operated broadband networks. Sohn’s now the head of an organization dubbed the American Association for Public Broadband, which advocates for locally-owned and operated alternatives to the lumbering, regional telecom monopolies we long ago normalized.
The full article is available here.