Wheeler Leaning Most on a Few Trusted Advisers as FCC Rewrites Net Neutrality Rules

Sallet advises Wheeler but also has a direct supervisory role in the management of key issues, from net neutrality to the IP transition, industry and agency officials said. Before joining the FCC he was a lawyer at MCI and, later, O'Melveny & Myers, where he was a key legal adviser to Verizon, among other clients. Verveer, who spent the first part of the Obama administration at the State Department, is a former FCC official and longtime Washington insider who provided counsel to Wheeler when he was still at CTIA. Verveer represented Comcast and other ISPs while in private practice, industry officials note.

As the longtime president of CTIA, Wheeler had what was in effect a kitchen cabinet of top advisers who sat around a table in his office and hashed out decisions on key questions facing the wireless association, say industry officials who knew him then. The officials say they have no reason to doubt Wheeler is employing the same methods at the FCC, where his office has a similar meeting table.

Other key staffers include Ruth Milkman, chief of staff, and Gigi Sohn, former president of Public Knowledge, who has provided key outreach to public interest groups important to the Obama administration, industry officials said. They said Sohn apparently pushed Wheeler to do more outreach, including the series of roundtables on net neutrality, over some objections from other advisers.

Scott Jordan, FCC chief technology officer, has held numerous recent meetings on net neutrality, records show. Jordan was a professor at the University of California-Irvine, where he stressed the importance of the FCC learning to better distinguish between business policies and traffic management policies (see 1408270034).

Julie Veach, chief of the Wireline Bureau, and Roger Sherman, chief of the Wireless Bureau, joined Sallet as authors of a recent blog post explaining the commission’s most recent thinking on net neutrality. Industry observers said the two are also playing a key behind-the-scenes role as the FCC works out net neutrality rules, though neither has the same history with Wheeler as his most trusted advisers. Stephanie Weiner, who works for Sallet, is special adviser to the chairman on Internet law and policy.

Wheeler will call on key FCC staffers for advice, then “back it up with his trusted advisers,” said a wireless industry lawyer who knows the chairman well from his days at CTIA. “Tom likes multiple opinions and viewpoints -- all good qualities in making sound public policy decisions.”

Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, now at Wiley Rein, said the team Wheeler put together is typical for any chairman. "Every chairman, and virtually every commissioner for that matter, either needs or already has a small handful of very close advisers," McDowell told us. “These are usually people with whom the chairman has ​worked successfully in some capacity over a long period of time, engendering trust and familiarity. They become the 'go-to' confidants for a wide variety of difficult decisions and their composition can evolve over time. Chairman Wheeler is no exception and has his own trusted inner circle. "

Georgetown Law Institute for Public Representation Senior Counselor Andrew Schwartzman said no one can knock Wheeler's decision-making process. Schwartzman contrasted Wheeler with former Chairmen Julius Genachowski and Kevin Martin. “The process Chairman Wheeler uses is much more inclusive and organized than was the case with recent predecessors,” Schwartzman said. Wheeler “has assembled an extremely talented, diverse and experienced team, and he takes their advice seriously. Chairman Genachowski and, even more so, Chairman Martin, relied on a much smaller coterie of advisers, and did not always look at the issues from a systematic perspective.”

A former FCC official who does not represent industry clients said Verveer and Sallet are “longtime” Wheeler “friends and advisers and he trusts them a lot.” The former official said work on any issue like net neutrality produces a “certain all-hands-on-deck mentality” at the FCC.

A former FCC legal adviser who does not represent clients engaged in the net neutrality fight said Wheeler shares similarities with Sohn, Verveer and Sallet. “They don’t think politically; rather, they believe there is a right and wrong to every telecom debate,” the former official said. “That can be seen in nearly every decision the chairman has made in the first year, from cellphones on airplanes to broadcaster joint sales agreements to the unfortunate rollout of net neutrality.”

Every chairman has an "inner circle" of advisers, said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld. “It's part of being human,” he said. “You need someone you can trust to bounce ideas off and give you a reality check.” But a second public interest group official who would speak only on background said many are concerned about Sallet’s ties to Verizon and Verveer’s to Comcast. “There's nobody in his circle from the tech community -- only Gigi from the public interest community, and her job is outreach not advising,” the source said. There is nobody “who has built a web company or worked at one.”

Wheeler said in a speech to the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association Tuesday he remains committed to net neutrality, based in part on his years as a venture capitalist after he left CTIA. Wheeler said he saw “up close and personal how those who control networks can decide the fate of new ideas and new services based solely on the interests of the network provider,” according to his written remarks. “It is the Internet’s open design that has allowed innovation without permission, enabled your companies to scale quickly, and encouraged entrepreneurs to build world-leading companies in garages and dorm rooms.”

Verizon General Counsel Randal Milch said in a blog post Tuesday a legal challenge to revised rules is not a foregone conclusion. Verizon filed the lawsuit against the 2010 rules that led to the January decision in which they were largely thrown out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (see 1401150046). “The FCC has the opportunity to create Net Neutrality rules that prevent any harmful ‘paid prioritization’ practices that some fear, and to do so in a way that both ensures the rules are not overturned and makes further litigation a diminishing prospect,” Milch wrote. The key is basing rules on Section 706 of the Communications Act, he said. “If the FCC reclassifies Internet access as a Title II service, the hyper-regulatory group will be happy, but may sue anyway if the FCC forbears from too many arcane common carrier rules for their taste (and to keep their fund raising pipeline flowing),” Milch said. “ISPs, and perhaps some in the tech industry, will have no choice but to fight the sudden reversal of two decades of settled law.”