Tom wheeler fcc biography of donald

In the aftermath of the deadly Capitol insurrection, Tom Wheeler—a technology regulation advocate and former chair of the Federal Communications Commission—got back to work. Wheeler, who is seventy-four—and, now, a Walter Shorenstein fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School—may be uniquely positioned to effect change.

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Last August the trio—Wheeler, Phil Verveer, and Gene Kimmelman—released a proposal for a new government body, to be known as the Digital Platform Agency, that could regulate tech platforms just as the Federal Aviation Administration regulates airlines and aircraft builders. In contrast, the Digital Platform Agency would be granted the authority to hold companies to account by applying principles of common law: duty of care, aimed at mitigating harm to consumers, and duty to deal, which ensures that monopolistic companies make essential services available to all, including potential competitors.

Regulating new technologies using centuries-old legal precepts may seem counterintuitive, but Wheeler is a history buff. Several years ago, on a tour of the National Archives, he saw handwritten copies of telegrams sent by Abraham Lincoln. Joe Biden has put tech regulation on his long to-do list, and, already, antitrust cases filed by the Justice Department against Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple have the potential to change the way American-made websites operate everywhere.

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