President Joe Biden‘s ambitious push to restore net neutrality and the technology industry has suffered significant delays because his nominees for top posts have struggled to gain Senate confirmations.
The shortage of key personnel at the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission has prevented Democrats from having a majority at both agencies and stopped them from moving forward with their ambitious antitrust, broadband, and net neutrality goals.
FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, a prominent liberal activist and a former Democratic staffer at the commission, was nominated six months ago, and FTC nominee Alvaro Bedoya, a Georgetown University law professor and prominent privacy advocate, was nominated eight months ago. Both nominations have taken significantly longer to get confirmed compared to those nominated under previous administrations.
Their nominations have remained in limbo due to limited Senate floor time. The upper chamber has been preoccupied recently with the Ukraine invasion and Supreme Court nominees, on top of the difficulties created by the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the Senate. The nominees also face fierce opposition from Republicans and certain industries to their confirmation.
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Allies say the delay in confirming them hurts the Biden administration’s agenda while temporarily allowing the broadband industry and Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Google off the hook for bad behavior because the FTC and FCC are gridlocked.
“Rules related to bringing back net neutrality and regulating the Big Tech companies will take time to implement, and this delays those goals from being achieved,” said Greg Guice, head of government affairs at open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge.
“At some point, these folks will get confirmed and the agency work will continue, and the opposed industries will have bought a little time and not much else. It’s so frustrating,” said Guice, who has pushed to get FCC and FTC nominees confirmed since 1999.
The telecommunications and broadband industries hope to block Sohn from being confirmed in order to delay Democratic-backed regulations, most notably net neutrality, which refers to regulations on the basis that internet providers should treat all data on the internet the same and not discriminate or charge differently based on where it’s coming from or to whom it’s going.
Internet service providers are also worried that, under a Democratic majority at the FCC, they could be forced to invest in building broadband internet connectivity in low-income cities and rural areas where it is less profitable.
Guice said that because the tech and telecom industries know that net neutrality and greater antitrust regulations are important to the Biden administration’s agenda, they have lobbied particularly aggressively to delay Sohn and Bedoya’s nominations.
Biden also faces criticism for failing to nominate the candidates earlier.
“There’s very clearly a lot of goals that the Democrats have on their tech agenda that requires a majority at the FTC and FCC, and they’re not going anywhere,” said Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group that advocates greater broadband access and competition.
“Sohn and Bedoya were nominated much later than necessary, very late. It’s one of those things where if the administration moved earlier, then they could be confirmed already because you never know when something like Ukraine could happen,” Falcon said.
The delay could cause even greater headaches for the administration next year if Republicans take back control of the House and Senate, as polls currently indicate.
“It seems that perhaps the White House doesn’t care that much about their tech agenda and doesn’t see it as priority because the clock is ticking,” said Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, a libertarian-leaning tech-funded think tank.
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“Time is short, and they need to get off their asses and move on their agenda for their own sake because rule-making takes a long time and there will be challenges and court cases. And everything must be pushed before the summer of 2024,” Szoka said.
