Profile of the FCC's general counsel Jonathan Sallet, helping to create and defend rules shaping TV and the Internet
Cecilia Kang / New York Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This profile lands at the moment the FCC is assembling the machinery to police telephone, television, and Internet providers: in late 2015 the agency hired Stanford privacy researcher Jonathan Mayer as technical lead for probes into ISP practices, and earlier that year it named an ombudsperson to hear net neutrality complaints. Sallet, as general counsel, is the lawyer who has to draft those rules so they survive legal challenge — the piece matters because it maps where the commission's actual rulemaking power sits.
First-order effects
- ISPs and broadcasters now face an FCC whose legal office is actively defending open-Internet and consumer-protection rules in court, meaning Sallet's litigation strategy — not just the commissioners' votes — determines what the rules actually require.
Second-order effects
- FTC chairman Joseph Simons' later push for direct authority over privacy practices and fining power shows the jurisdictional squeeze Sallet's work creates: companies subject to FCC consumer-protection rules also face claims from a rival agency seeking overlapping turf.
Third-order effects
- The general counsel seat is emerging as a pipeline into top enforcement jobs — Adam Candeub moved from FCC general counsel to nomination for the DOJ antitrust unit in Trump's 2026 nomination — suggesting agency lawyers, not legislators, are becoming the durable authors of US tech and telecom policy.
The trend: US internet and telecom regulation is increasingly written and defended by agency legal staffs whose influence spans administrations and crosses agency lines.