D.C. Memo: Tom Wheeler - Good Guy, Bad Historian
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Obama: What exactly did former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, published amateur historian, have for breakfast before speaking to the Washington Post the other day about FCC Chairman Brendan Carr? It seems Wheeler served up some faulty revisionist history about Net Neutrality to fit the story’s desired narrative. The Post – joining the left-of-center Carr pile on that has been building for weeks – reached out to Democrat Wheeler for his take on Carr’s early aggressive moves against ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, and Comcast/NBCUniversal.
The Post’s article first quoted Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez effectively saying President Trump was running the agency. The affable Wheeler, President Obama’s second “hand-picked” FCC Chairman, told the Post that Obama never interfered. “The history is that we were treated independently. Barack Obama said to me early on, ‘I will never call you.’ And he was true to his word.” The record, however, tells a different story. In November 2014, a few days after Republicans triumphed in the midterms, Obama went on Facebook to basically order the FCC to impose Title II Net Neutrality rules on broadband ISPs. “To put these protections in place, I'm asking the FCC to reclassify Internet service under Title II of the law known as the Telecommunications Act,” Obama said in a short video. In case Wheeler didn’t get the message, White House aides kept the pressure on him because Wheeler, a former cable and wireless lobbyist, had been pushing back on Title II, according to the Wall Street Journal. Three months after Obama’s Facebook video, the Wheeler FCC adopted Title II. The FCC did so, according to then-Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, “because President Obama told us to." Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said Net Neutrality rules under Title II were unlawful, maintaining ISPs as lightly regulated information service providers.
