Interview with former FCC head Tom Wheeler on the new FCC chairman, Trump administration's talk of “modernizing” the FCC, municipal broadband, and more
Obama's FCC head Tom Wheeler talks candidly about the open internet—and why, in Trumpworld, four companies could lock it up.
Context & Ripple Effects
Tom Wheeler's arc runs from his controversial Title II reclassification of broadband in 2015, through a Republican election victory that made his position untenable, to his December announcement that he would resign on January 20 rather than hand Trump's FCC a Democratic chairman. His January farewell speech was the closing argument; this Backchannel interview is the first extended commentary from outside the building.
The timing matters: Wheeler left with the open-internet rules intact but their enforcement in the hands of a incoming Republican majority, and he uses the interview to frame what 'modernizing' the FCC actually means under the new administration — and to warn that the open internet could end up controlled by four companies.
First-order effects
- The new Republican FCC majority can now move to unwind the Title II framework Wheeler built, since his resignation removed the last check on a commission vote reversing Obama-era regulations.
- Wheeler's continued public platform — this interview following his farewell speech defending net neutrality — keeps him as the most prominent outside critic of whatever rollback the new chairman proposes.
Second-order effects
- Broadband providers gain room to reintroduce paid prioritization and zero-rating arrangements that Title II constrained, shifting pricing power back toward the largest ISPs.
- Municipal broadband networks, which Wheeler championed against state-level preemption laws, lose their federal patron — leaving city-run projects dependent on state legislatures and courts instead.
Third-order effects
- If Wheeler's four-company warning holds, US internet access consolidates into a handful of vertically integrated gatekeepers whose conduct is governed by whichever party controls the commission — making core internet rules swing with each administration rather than settle.
- A successful 'modernization' framing at the FCC would set a template for other agencies: deregulation repackaged as updating, with the burden of proof shifted onto defenders of existing rules.
The trend: US communications policy is entering an era of partisan whiplash, where net neutrality and broadband regulation are rewritten with each change of White House rather than anchored in settled law.