It is not ignorant to be sketical of a political appointee, on the contrary, anyone is wise to be skeptical. Observe the tremendous difficulty of either political party to find and appoint suitable people to these positions. Color me cautiously optimistic, but not yet ready to abandon all Wheeler/FCC skepticism. There are so many things in politics that are not what they appear to be; and, there has to be a tremendous amount of pressure on Wheeler from all sides. If Wheeler turns out to be a political appointee who manages to be a reasonable advocate for the citizenry despite the considerable pressure from all competing interests, I'll call him a remarkable exception.
It's ignorant to seize on one line of a political appointee's 40-year resume to insist they'll be corrupt when there is considerable evidence to the contrary.
Wheeler kept a blog for years about all of his thoughts regarding telecom regulation, but it's much easier to call him a dingo and assume he's evil than it is to do research and develop a true picture of his intentions.
Unfortunately, his blog has lapsed, but some of the posts are still available via Archive.org. Some Good posts;
The 2nd is particularly interesting since he explicitly supports the anti-SOPA movement:
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 power of the Internet is its lack of centralized
control. Its distributed architecture means the network
functions at the edge rather than at a central point.
That edge activity, in turn, creates what the SOPA
supporters were trying to constrain: access they can’t
control. While its goal of stopping piracy is laudable
and important, SOPA’s practical effect was to
restructure through law the functionality of the
Internet.
Call it ignorance or call it lazy cynicism, but it's clear the blind Wheeler hate was completely unfounded.
Nice post. You're certainly right that the anti-Wheeler fervor was strong here on HN (probably almost as strong as the Anti Obama agenda presented by the comments on this article).
I think I fell for it myself and was pleasantly surprised when this announcement came. Now I know I had let a lack of diligence had prevented me from seeing that this announcement may have been far more likely than I ever thought.
It's easy to be swept up by the resounding chorus of comments here sometimes.
Alan Greenspan once championed the gold standard, that obviously didn't last forever.
>It's ignorant to seize on one line of a political appointee's 40-year resume
People are often defined by their most recent accomplishment(s) (unless a worse one can be dredged up from the past).
I try to keep myself informed of current events, but I'm not always as successful as I would like, and I've not got unlimited time to go digging through the Internet Archive to find and read Wheeler's old blog posts (of which I was unaware). If they were so central to Wheeler's philosophy why did they not receive more recent attention?
>it's clear the blind Wheeler hate was completely unfounded.
If to you, "blind Wheeler hate" == skepticism, then it's not clear at all, but I am starting to warm up to the guy. Thanks for the blog links.
PS, I also doubt that we'd be better off today without the enormous furore over FCC internet regulation.
> If they were so central to Wheeler's philosophy why did they not receive more recent attention?
I don't mean to imply that you're a lazy cynic, just that the easily digestible stories on HN (especially political ones) are often lazy and cynical.
"OMG, I just saw John Oliver, did you know Wheeler was a lobbyist for the cable companies!?"
vs.
Acknowledging that he was a lobbyist for the NCTA during the Jimmy Carter administration and realizing that his more recent lobbying work was for the CTIA - (Still over 10 years ago) - where they were trying to free up more spectrum to enable wireless broadband.
For the past 10 years, he worked with a VC firm that invested hundreds of millions into tech companies. Wheeler personally sat on the board of Earthlink, InPhonic, and Telephia...
I'm not sure why the narrative was so far off the mark but I gave up trying to correct it a long time ago. Rest assured though, there at least a few people that weren't surprised whatsoever about Wheeler's pro-consumer actions.
Not really. Its rare not to see multiple sides of issues represented here, and its not that uncommon to see people on opposing sides each claiming that HN is biased against their viewpoint in favor of the opposing one to the point of completely excluding their viewpoint.
HN isn't perfectly balanced -- there are certainly issues where the one-side or the other has substantially more support on HN. But its far from an echo chamber.
