Any lingering doubts as to where the incoming Obama administration will be coming from on telecom policy were more or less erased Friday when the president elect named Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach to lead the transition team at the Federal Communications Commission. Both Crawford and Werbach are industry experts and proponents of "broadband everywhere." Crawford, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and author of a widely read blog on communications issues, in particular has been critical of the telecom industry and has endorsed treating broadband connectivity like a regulated or municipally provided utility, similar to water, sewage and electricity service. Werbach is a professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference. During the Clinton administration, he served as counsel for new technology policy at the FCC.

While the transition team will not be making policy, the appointments of Crawford and Werbach is a pretty strong signal that the Obama administration will not be very patient with incumbent telecom providers as the U.S. falls ever-farther behind the rest of the world in broadband access and available bandwidth.

Perhaps even more important, however, is what the appointments say about the incoming administration's approach to policy making. As Media Wonk argued in a previous post, President-elect Obama could make a significant contribution by setting a tone through his appointments that encourages genuine, public-interesting oriented policy-making, rather than the all-too-common practice in Washington of simply splitting the difference between competing corporate interests and calling it a policy.

Notwithstanding Werbach's stint at the FCC, both he and Crawford are basically Beltway outsiders who have developed independent expertise on the issues before the commission through their work in academe. They share a global perspective on technology policy and have little in the way of direct ties to industry. They are, in short, serious students of telecom policy (which no doubt makes them great fun at parties), more concerned with the issues at stake than the interests.

I'd call that a very encouraging start.

Paul Sweeting is the Editor of Content Agenda, a business-to-business brand dedicated to the nexus of content, technology and business. This piece was originally published on Paul's blog "Media Wonk" on Content Agenda and is posted on DMW with the author's permission. 

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