Obama’s FCC Transition Team
This is not exactly what I expected, but it sounds like great news. Obama’s new FCC Transition team is headed up by Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach who are huge proponents of net-neutrality. And if that is not enough they are also fans of World of Warcraft and Second Life. It will be nice to hopefully have some people on board who are actually conversant with the issues.
Susan Crawford, a University of Michigan law professor of communications law, and Ken Werbach, a Wharton School assistant professor and a former counsel for new technology policy at the FCC during the Clinton administration, will lead the team.
Ms. Crawford is a former partner of a Washington law firm that specializes in communications law and recently left the board of directors of ICANN, a group that oversees Internet domain-name registration. Mr. Werbach edited Release 1.0, a technology newsletter, and founded Supernova Group, a technology analysis and consulting firm. [link]
Last week, President-elect Obama appointed Kevin Werbach, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, and Susan Crawford, who teaches communications and Internet law at the University of Michigan, to co-chair his FCC transition team. In preparation for his incoming administration, the two, both seasoned Net Neutrality advocates, will be tasked with providing information on U.S. government Internet and telecom policies, along with advising on budgetary and personnel matters.
This is clearly good news for Net advocates, and as it happens, it could also be good news for online gamers. The Wharton professor is a hardcore World of Warcraft player, a member of two guilds:
Unsurprisingly, this perspective extends to virtual worlds like Second Life, which has been an important component in Werbach’s Supernova technology conference. On her own blog, Professor Crawford, a board member at ICANN, also counts herself “a huge fan of Second Life” for the way it lets users retain IP rights to their content (though she confesses to difficulty when it comes to moving her SL avatar around.) [link]