My experience with Libertelli may or may not be instructive. He and I wrote battling Op-Eds for the Mercury News about Net Neutrality before the infamous “Tiger Hearing” at Stanford, where Martin gave Larry Lessig 30 minutes to rail against capitalism before the people who actually know something about networks were allowed to speak (for 8 minutes each.) I write my piece, and the one that ran under Libertelli’s name was actually written by a PR agency. If the guy is so lame that he can’t produce 550 words about his company’s favorite subject without professional assistance, I doubt he can run a major regulatory agency by himself.

I think it might be interesting to appoint a couple of engineers to the FCC, just for the fun of it. Why should the lawyers have all the fun?

Just when I thought we might actually agree on something for the first time… To clarify, Phil Weiser is at the Silicon Flatirons program at the University of Colorado, not at Consumers Union. (To us alums the school is known as “CU.”) Phil is a law professor and runs in my mind the best telecom/Internet policy event each year; he’s also written extensively on policy subjects, in about the most even manner you can find.

And Skype may not be the most open (or profitable) company but Chris is a pretty smart guy and strikes me as someone who listens and thinks. My overall point was meant to be that there seems to be a good number of people who have both the skills and knowledge Om seeks and enough D.C. experience to hit the ground running. And I think the chair will need both.

And Skype is scarcely any better: it’s a company that’s never made money and has no prospect of making money because it has neither a product nor a service to sell. So it hides behind this ridiculous Carterphone analogy as an excuse for its lack of capitalistic acumen, seeking to punish those companies that have made actual investments in real infrastructure and services.

We can do a lot better than paranoid consumer warriors still fighting yesterday’s battles.

With all the telecom experience in the Obama camp, I don’t think the FCC chair needs to be an exceptional visionary. Just as Richard B says, open mind, sound judgement. The Democrats as a whole already have enough brainpower and attention devoted to matters telecom to ever let a Martin- or Powell-style regime happen again, at least not for the next four years.

At the end of the discussion, I was convinced that very few people are in this camp, so how about an IAB member on the commission or bring J. Scott Marcus back to help us.

I would be a horrible FCC Chairman, I have no aptitude for administration at all, and neither do my advocacy colleagues such as Harold, et. al.

Tom’s support of the McCain/Palin ticket speaks to a critical dimension of leadership, political judgment. An FCC chairman who would put the Wicked Witch of Wasilla a heartbeat away from the presidency is the last thing we need in the post-Martin era. The job is too important to entrust to a dabbler.

The FCC Chairman needs to be someone of moderate temperament and high intelligence, like the President-elect. He needs to keep an open mind, absorb the facts, and make sound judgments on matters that will have public impact for years to come. Whoever it is, he or she had best not be a shoot-from-the-hip advocate. All the people who’ve been fighting over net neutrality are automatically eliminated for being too partisan.

So that doesn’t really say whether he is up for the job or not. I am sure you are equipped to handle the FCC and same goes for Harold Feld. I just think the same-old establishment as mentioned by Paul Kapustka and Doug Mohney are the problem when it comes to issues like this.