"I have met with the Chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, and I believe he is a good actor that wants to do the right thing. But he is fighting against very powerful lobbyists and large companies that want to disrupt the freedom of the Internet."
"Prior to working at the FCC, Wheeler worked as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry"
-Wikipedia
Really? Somehow I doubt that he has turned a full 180 and is now trying to protect the internet against people in his former occupation.
Rule of thumb. Assume people are operating fairly until proven otherwise. If you meet someone and treat them as a good actor, it becomes easier for them to BE one.
Truth is he is probably a politician. He will do whatever he thinks is going to get him the most support. So if you can convince him that is going against his former friends, he will do that. (180 flips in policy are very common in politicians.)
Instead of making the lazy connection that he used to be a lobbyist and he must still keep those views, why don't you read some of the stuff he's written over the years, or look at some of the companies he's backed to see if you think he's still beholden to the cable companies?
Read this article from Wheeler about SOPA, written long before he was at the FCC:
> Backed by Hollywood and others whose business model requires controlled scarcity of product, SOPA in many ways echoed the cable fight of 40 years earlier. The policy matter is not whether copyright holders should receive recompense for their products (they should), but whether legislation to protect that right is aircover to perpetuate old practices at the expense of new networks. There is no doubt there are honest-to-God Web pirates operating in China, Russia, and elsewhere who are stealing copyrighted product. These pirates should be stopped. But SOPA’s effort to accomplish this – which also just happened to strengthen the hand of content companies in other regards – applied concepts more applicable to the command and control networks of yesterday than to the open access networks of today. The result was an unparalleled protest and a political train wreck.
Does that sound like some mustache-twirling lobbyist-in-disguise?
Or his thinking about net neutrality from 2009:
> So, in a world where spectrum licensees are unwilling to part with their assignments and the spectrum agency wants to help while at the same time increasing demand, why isn’t net neutrality an opportunity for the wireless industry? Viewing the current spectrum and net neutrality issues holistically rather than in isolation just might be an opportunity for both the wireless industry and the Administration.
> President Obama campaigned on his support for net neutrality. Thus, it should come as no surprise that his FCC chairman has moved promptly on the matter, or that a Democrat-controlled commission is likely to adopt it. How it is implemented thus becomes more important than whether it exists. Rules that recognize the unique characteristics of a spectrum-based service and allow for reasonable network management would seem to be more important than the philosophical debate over whether there should be rules at all. Similarly, a rule that allows for variable pricing is an opportunity for wireless carriers to change the revenue paradigm at a time when revenue per megabyte is in a freefall.
"Prior to working at the FCC, Wheeler worked as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry" -Wikipedia
Really? Somehow I doubt that he has turned a full 180 and is now trying to protect the internet against people in his former occupation.