Done With Doldrums

The Senate voted several key communications agency nominations off its plate Thursday night. It’s like a sigh of relief and a cynical shake of the head all at once: the comms industry has needed to sail out of the doldrums in which it’s languished but it’s had to wait on policymakers before it could start working on critical strategies and reforms. And those approvals weren’t really expected until next month. But it always kills me how members of Congress, headed for yet another vacation they don’t want to begin late or cut short, suddenly have the time and presence of mind to make decisions.

Regardless, we finally have a new FCC chairman, a re-confirmed Republican commissioner and a new National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) head.

Julius Genachowski now takes over for Michael Copps, who has served as acting FCC chairman since January. By all accounts, Copps did a solid job in dealing with a demoralized staff and in launching creation of a national broadband policy, as tasked by the White House. Oh, and he shepherded the country through the DTV transition.

All notable accomplishments for Copps. Still, it’s a bit of a mystery why he allowed the CenturyTel-Embarq merger to be pushed through before Genachowski stepped in. Copps himself even admitted in a June 25 statement the transaction’s conditions were tepid at best and that the terms set no precedents for future deal approvals. So maybe the rationale stems from the expectation that Genachowski will be more thorough, dare I say strict, than his predecessors. And maybe Copps & Co. didn’t want to hold up the creation of the nation’s largest rural carrier over broadband deployment and competitor access concerns. Petty matters, anyway, right?

Nonetheless, it’s Genachowski who gets to call the shots during this, his first term as FCC chairman. Observers long have anticipated that he will champion net neutrality principles, stand up for CLECs and scrutinize industry consolidation. If the congratulatory press releases streaming in from the likes of XO Communications, tw telecom and COMPTEL are any indication, that’s exactly what competitors envision.

He has a lot to live up to, does Genachowski. Yet it looks as though he’ll have a strong complement of commissioners surrounding him, even though they won’t always agree. For instance, Robert McDowell is headed into his second term as a Republican FCC member, and Mignon Clyburn and Meredith Attwell Baker are expected to join as soon as they receive their Senate nods. Jonathan Adelstein is off to oversee the Rural Utilities Service. He’ll be missed but it will be good to have a fresh Democratic voice, although it’s debatable how independent of lobbyist interests Clyburn really will be. For now, the situation is relegated to the cliché “wait and see” realm.

McDowell, meanwhile, has been a refreshing FCC commissioner. A Republican and former COMPTEL lawyer, he often opposed the positions of former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin; Martin was quite accustomed to his fellow Republicans blindly following his lead and McDowell several times refused to do that. For that alone, that willingness to think apart from the crowd, I am glad McDowell’s staying at the FCC (although I hear through the grapevine he’s a really good guy and that’s always an asset among policymakers).

Finally we have Larry Strickling, new top dog at the NTIA, part of the Commerce Department. Strickling once was a top FCC staffer. And since the FCC and NTIA are collaborating somewhat on the formation of a national broadband policy – the FCC is taking the lead – the crossover should help push that along, especially as NTIA distributes $4.5 billion in broadband stimulus funds.

So, even though Congress has the luxury of its fourth vacation so far this year, the new appointees to the FCC and NTIA should be getting to work the week of June 29. Maybe now the industry will start to see some headway on broadband deployment and other long-lingering issues. It might be summer, but let’s hope the season of stagnation has passed for the comms industry.