Wheeler Says Watching FCC Reverse His Actions is 'Painful'
Watching his decisions as chairman be reversed by what he repeatedly called “the Trump FCC” is “painful,” said former Chairman Tom Wheeler in an interview on C-Span's The Communicators, likely to be telecast Saturday and posted Friday. Wheeler, now with the Brookings Institution, disputed reports he ordered a cover-up of a distributed denial of service attack (see 1806060032 and 1806070051), praised the EU general data protection regulation and dared current Chairman Ajit Pai to push for Congress to enact net neutrality legislation. If Pai “has the courage of his convictions” and current net neutrality rules are “right for the American people,” Pai should call House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and ask for a vote, Wheeler said. It's “fascinating” the Republican position during his administration was that Congress should decide net neutrality rules and now it's the reverse, he said.
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Companies won't begin discriminating against content overnight once the current net neutrality rules take effect Monday, Wheeler said. But consumers “shouldn't be surprised” if it does begin to happen, he said. “Birds will still fly, chickens will still lay eggs,” Wheeler said, but also ISPs will be told it's “fair to discriminate,” he said. The lack of Title II regulation is one explanation why companies like AT&T and Comcast are seeking to acquire other companies, Wheeler said. “The absence of rules” makes such expansion “more attractive,” Wheeler said.
Former Chief Information Officer David Bray emailed Wheeler to deny ever having said that Wheeler ordered a cover-up of a DDoS attack on the FCC, Wheeler said. Bray and other staff members are united in saying that the attack didn't happen, and he doesn't know why current FCC officials have said such an attack occurred, he said. “I am the last person in the world to interpret the decisionmaking of the Trump FCC.” It's “hard to have coverup if it didn't happen,” Wheeler said.
Wheeler praised the GDPR and European privacy rules and called it “a shame” that the U.S. ceded leadership on privacy to Europe. "You have to build in the expectation of privacy,” Wheeler said. He supports privacy regulation over edge providers such as Google and Facebook, he said. “There ought to be oversight by the people's representatives,” rather than leaving it to the companies themselves, Wheeler said.
The FCC and Republicans aren't doing enough to ensure network security, Wheeler said. Protections for cybersecurity from his administration were largely “gutted,” Wheeler said. The U.S. needs a “holistic program” for network security rather than individual “rifleshot” efforts, Wheeler said. There is “an absence” of an overall cybersecurity program “at the Trump FCC,” Wheeler said. “Seems to me the agency responsible for America's networks needs to also show leadership in the security of those networks.”
New FCC Commissioner nominee Geoffrey Starks worked in the Enforcement Bureau under Wheeler but the former chairman has never met him, Wheeler said. Wheeler's FCC kept a separation between “political types” and enforcement policy, he said.
T-Mobile buying Sprint would be bad for consumers, Wheeler said, and he also condemned Sinclair's proposed acquisition of Tribune Media. The current FCC “systematically eliminated” rules that would have prevented Sinclair/Tribune, he said.
“Chairman Pai and I have different approaches,” Wheeler said. Wheeler sees the job of chairman as representing consumers, while Pai focuses more directly on the well-being of corporations, Wheeler said.