The Chair Recognized

Abstract

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski's announced exit from the commission sometime in the next several weeks was that proverbial other shoe Washington had been waiting to hear drop for months. Genachowski's statement triggered a good deal of praise for his tenure, mixed with some harsh criticism from anti-consolidation activists. The chairman got a lot right during his almost four years in the big chair. That included starting to migrate the Universal Service Fund to broadband, taking a number of steps to give cable operators more control of their bandwidth to make it easier to build out their service -- though usually it was the broadband side that was getting the boost -- and taking a cautious approach to calls to remake retransmission procedure.