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.