Obama appoints two gamers to FCC Transition Team. Does it matter?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:53:14 -0800

In two separate articles, virtual worlds expert Wagner James Au expresses excitement about two of the individuals appointed to President-elect Barack Obama's FCC Transition Team. Both have experience with the virtual world, and Au thinks this bodes well for U.S. telecommunications policy.

In one, a piece for New World Notes, he links appointees Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach to Second Life. Crawford noted her interest in Second Life in a blog entry back in 2004. And he points out that Werbach brought a live stream from his Supernova conference in-world in 2006. In the second article, written for GigaOm, he adds that Werbach is a hardcore World of Warcraft player (Level 70 Tauren Shaman, if you care), listing his character's Armory page on his blog's about page.

The assumption is made that since both Crawford and Werbach have at least some experience with bandwidth-sucking MMOGs, they'll be more sympathetic to the cause of the consumer when it comes to net neutrality issues. Both have been described by Wired as "long-time neutrality advocates."

However, this may be reading into the appointments a little too much. Regardless of whether each is a gamer or personally supports net neutrality, the FCC doesn't have a great deal of enforcement powers when it comes to dealing with broadband providers. In addition, the FCC is better known for wrist-slapping than anything else. Broadband company lobbyists are already trying to position themselves for the next administration, with Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post noting that AT&T's chief lobbyist Jim Cicconi feels the current legislation surrounding net neutrality is sufficient:

"He said the FCC shouldn't revise its broadband principles and that the agency should deal with network discrimination practices on a 'case by case basis.'"

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Obama appoints two gamers to FCC Transition Team. Does it matter?